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I have 2 drives on my box: a primary, fairly small, SSD drive and a huge regular hard drive. I am running out of space on my SSD drive.

I already have instructions on how to move it, but I would like to know whether or not it's a good idea. What will be the impact on performance?

My box has 8GB of RAM and the page file itself is 8GB as well.

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AngryHacker
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2 Answers2

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I would leave the page file where it is, unless you plan on moving it to another SSD. The pagefile is where Windows keeps less frequently used chunks of memory. One of the reasons to run Windows on an SSD is because pagefile swapping is so much faster.

I have a system with an SSD and a regular HDD. Any programs I install (especially games) go to the HDD. All music, movies and documents are on the SSD. The SSD only contains files necessary to run Windows.

Ed Manet
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I'd argue that if you ever end up paging out to disk, regardless of where that disk is (e.g. HDD, SSD), you should probably consider adding more RAM to the system. Although SSDs are significantly faster than HDDs, especially for random seeking, SSDs still have 10-100x less throughput and response time than the equivalent RAM would.

If you end up paging out to disk, to either an HDD or SSD, your computer will become unbearably slow.

For that reason, I personally would (and do) put the pagefile on the HDD, since SSDs have a limited number of writes. Having a pagefile on the SSD would only cause the drive to wear out faster (assuming you're even using your pagefile to begin with).

TL,DR: If you're paging, your system is going to be very very slow, regardless of wether or not the pagefile is on an SSD or HDD, since both are many orders of magnitude slower than RAM is to begin with. Given that point, I would place the pagefile on the HDD, since SSDs have limited numbers of writes.

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