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Pagefile placement w/ 16 gb RAM & SSD or hybrid drives?


drive55

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Pagefile placement w/ 16 gb RAM & SSD or hybrid drives?

I've searched/read a couple somewhat related posts -

 *http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/143885-pagefile-questions/

*http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/141427-windows-7-readyboost-vs-pagefilevirtual-mem/page__view__findpost__p__905369

*http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/135806-32bit-or-x86-use-more-memory-above-325gb/page__p__868239__hl__pagefile__fromsearch__1#entry868239

but feel I have a specific situation that would hopefully justify this post.

Here's the scenario -

* ASUS G73JW laptop w/ 16 gb DDR 1333 3 channel RAM

* 3 hard drives : 1st & 2nd = both Seagate XT NCQ Hybrid 500 gb @ 7200 @ 32 MB cache

( eventually - the Primary drive will be an SSD)

* triple booting Win.7, XP, Linux (though XP will probably be run mostly in a VM on Win.7)

* usage - moderate video editing, VM study - not much gaming,

I'm just fortunate to subcontract for a grateful company that is rewarding my services with this hardware indulgence ;)

* habits/experience: this will be my 1st full adoption of Win.7 -

so far I've only toyed with it to see which apps work, learning the interface, & experimenting w/ RT 7lite + vLite to trim it down.

however, I use a very efficiently configured/trimmed nLited XP - only essential Services, xplorer2 window mgmt, etc ,

and plan to run Win.7 in the same manner - light and lean.

I've read some of Mark Russinovich's articles on Windows XP pagefiles -

from my impression he indicates that XP is actually designed to use pagefiles,

and that performance would drop somewhat if pagefiles are not used.

what about Windows 7 ?

I've also read recommendations in many places that optimization = placing a pagefile on a 2nd hard drive if one is available.

** 1st BIG QUESTION - with the given scenario - eliminate pagefile altogether with this setup?

or if pagefile is still desirable/necessary - create a pure RAM drive & set the pagefile there?

In the past I've read where that idea was bogus, but I assume that's because there was limited RAM to begin with,

and the whole point of pagefiles is to spare RAM?

But what happens if there's actually an over-abundance of RAM that exceeds all of the OS's, programs, & the user's needs?

such that 2 - 4 GB could be allocated to a pagefile RAM disk?

** 2nd BIG QUESTION - with the Seagate hybrid drive, and then with the idea of eventually using a true SSD for the Primary drive,

assuming that a pagefile is used, would it be just as optimum to set it on the primary drive,

as opposed to a Secondary drive? - due to the nature of the SSD technology?

Thanks very much for any guidance/suggestions, as well as links to accurate information/experiences.

:D

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With 16GB RAM there shouldn't be a need for a swap file. My system sports 4GB and also runs on Windows 7 without a pagefile. I also slimmed my OS down with vlite. The Memory footprint after a fresh install is 530MB...small enough even for comps with less RAM.

I used the same vlited version on an old Laptop of mine with 1GB RAM, also without pagefile and it worked well enough. Sometimes the system would throw messages that it was lacking enough memory, but after upgrading to 1.5GB I never saw any of those again, even when using lots of RAM-intense office apps.

The VM will eat the most RAM on your machine. I don't know how many VMs you plan on running and how much memory you want to assign to each of them, but imagine your system would have to swap gigabytes of memory to hdd. The slowdown would be quite annoying. Anyway, with the small memory footprint of Windows 7 and your huge amount of RAM a swapfile would rather be a step back in performance. So I suggest not using one. If you run into problems you can always enable it, so no reason not to try it without one.

Btw, I have been running all my systems without pagefile for the last 8 years and that without having insanely huge amounts of memory despite using memory intense apps.

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