If you have a separate physical drive, it's best to use that drive for your swap file for starters. Yes; you should have a swap file for a variety of reasons but won't outline them here (even if you have a large amount of RAM; I have 12Gs for instance which is considered large) but how Windows handles crashes can be an issue without a swap file for instance. Trust me; there's no such thing as a perfect OS. In case you may think that it would be a cool ideal to use a Ramdisk for your Swap file, let's just say, do not do that either.

Yeah; if you choose a separate drive for your swap file, you will find that a fractional size swap file will still show up on your main drive (why, I don't know; had been the case since I can remember).

The limiting thing in hard disks (of the "rotating rust" kind, not the "still silicon" ones) is the access time. You reduce the average access time by having more moving arms, ie, more disks. In other words, you should spread your pagefile.sys on as many physical drives as possible. swapfile.sys is a new thing in Win8, it doesn't grow very big (256M).

But a lylejk says, in Windows it is mostly used to slow down the system when you are getting close to your memory limit, and you don't normally run with a significant amount of swap. You can even run with no swap at all, in some case it is more efficient: I used to run a WinXP that would swap out things for no reason, when coming back from lunch the computer would take ages to get back to work, needing to read back all the swapped-out memory; removing the swap entirely made it lightning fast.

I have considered installing an SSD.
However, my motherboard/BIOS doesn't support AHCI mode.
I would need to run the SSD in IDE mode, which means I can't fully utilize an SSD's full potential.
Even so, I think it would still be faster then both my WD Black HDD.
Are you suggesting that the swapfile.sys be removed and to perhaps add another pagefile.sys?

I'm saying to completely ignore the swapfile.sys. And yes, spreading over several drives will likely create a second pagefile.sys.

So don't remove the swapfile(s), just ignore it/them?
Spreading what over several drives?
What is it that I should spread and how does this create pagefile(s)?
If you're talking about spreading the page file over all my drives, then I would have a page file and swap file for every drive, right?
I have to set the page file size, or let the OS do it form me. The other option would be to not have a page file and no page file, no swap file.
Maybe I'm confused.

So don't remove the swapfile(s), just ignore it/them?

Yes

Spreading what over several drives?

The memory swapping, which is done with pagefile.sys (swapfile.sys is for application "swapping", actually a way to hibernate them individually).

What is it that I should spread and how does this create pagefile(s)?

You just tell windows that it can swap on specific drives, it will create the pagefile.sys where needed. This is at least how in worked in XP...

If you're talking about spreading the page file over all my drives, then I would have a page file and swap file for every drive, right?

pagefile.sys, yes; swapfile.sys, likely not, because this is a completely different animal.

I have to set the page file size, or let the OS do it form me. The other option would be to not have a page file and no page file, no swap file.

You can definitely let Windows allocate the file. However it tends to be on the greedy side (you don't need more than your amount of RAM, or even half of this) and the manual setup also lets you allocate the swap file (ie, pagefile.sys) once for all, which makes it more likely to be in one block (especially on a new disk), which improves performance by reducing arm movements. If you want to be really picky and use partitions on your disks, put the swap files in their own partition on each physical drive.

You can also run without any swap. This is another option. On Windows, swapping can do more harm than good, because the system drops to a crawl when it swaps in most cases. With swapping disabled, the RAM glutton application dies instead of killing the system.

Thanks Ofnuts.

I've been using only a single page file placed on my D drive for a long time now.
With 8GB of RAM, I was setting the size at 12288MB with a maximum of 14336MB.
I may stick to this method.

Also... would having another page file of the same size on the C drive, be of any real use or benefit?

I was more concerned with the two separate wasp file and having only one page file.
When one places the page file on a different drive other then the C drive. The swap file on the C drive doesn't move with it.
There's no way to remove the swapfile.sys from the C drive, without resorting to creating a symbolic link for it, pointing to the swap file on my D drive.

Way too much. 8GB would have been more than enough. Also, having min=max means that everything is pre-allocated and stays together on the disk.

Same size, no. You need at best 8GB of swap, but that can be 2 files of 4GB each.


Leave the swapfile.sys alone and ignore it. It is only for the "Metro" apps and won't grow big.

The more I talk about this the more confused I become.
I'm just going to set the page file a1 1.5 times my ram and forget about it.
Thanks again Ofnuts.

Haven't toyed with pagefile size in ages. Decided to set my XP VM to no pagefile (have 2Gs allocated to my XP VM). It is now quite spiffy, Wallace; I'll let you know if my VM becomes unstable (not too concerned with crashes to my VM since I can quickly recover to a golden set point at will).

Okay Lyle, thanks.
I have 8GM of RAM, so I've set my page file for the C drive at 8000MB and the D drive at 12000MG.
Do you think that's overkill?
Also, would you recommend I use only one page file on a different drive other than the C drive?

Actually, that's what Windows recommends. If you just select the let Windows handle this option, you would be fine (that's what I did for my Win10 Host). Not had any issues other than an occasional issue with waking up from hybernate (but when it reboots from that crash, all's well but of course you have a new session of Windows). Has happened 3 or 4 times the past few months now. Started a thread at Windows Secrets about this. Anyway, I am, so far, happy that I set my XP VM pagefile to zero. It's definitely helpful for my XP VM anyway (but still I will have to worry about stability over time). I would not do this for my Host though.

Thanks Lyle.
You and Ofnuts have given me then enough suggestions.
I appreciate your guys feedback immensely.
The information that you both provided, was more then I've received form the Win10 Forum about this same issue.
On the Win10 Fourm, It seems that I spent more time trying to get people to understand my question. With little to no suggestion.