33gig Page file?

So I've been noticing my Corsair OS ssd has been having severe space dwindling away. I'm down to like 7 gigs free on a 120 gig drive (97 after format and split for the System partition). I thought the page file went to the system partition and left your normal OS install drive alone?

Well anyway after going through temp folders, windows download folders, etc and clearing out trash I went from 5 gig free up to 7 gig. There has got to be something going on still. My Steam games all install onto their own 4TB drive other then the stupid documents and my saved files that Steam likes to stick on your OS drive. (Dumb as hell)

I select every folder on my C: drive and check the properties. Only using 60G on disk. Well where the hell is the other 30 some odd gigs then? I then went and selected to show hidden OS files and sure enough the Page file is at some 33+ gigs. This seems insane!

Any ideas? Running Win 7 X64 with ssd drive for the OS.

I might add that I had 16 gig or ram but just upgraded to 32gig yesterday prior to even noticing this problem. Other then the space dwindling away over time.

No, by default the page file goes on the C: partition, but you can customize it to the size and location of your choice. Right click MyComputer>properties>advanced system settings>advanced>click performance tab then settings>advanced>change virtual memory>custom size>set 4GB min/max or 2mb min 4GB max. By default Windows uses double your ram, which is not usually needed, some run with no page file if they have 16GB but I don't recommend that. I have mine as system managed with 16GB ram and it is only 1GB right now on Win8.1, it changes depending on what I am running and it should on your PC too so don't know why it is using such a large pagefile.

rezerekted said:

No, by default the page file goes on the C: partition, but you can customize it to the size and location of your choice. Right click MyComputer>properties>advanced system settings>advanced>click performance tab then settings>advanced>change virtual memory>custom size>set 4GB min/max or 2mb min 4GB max. By default Windows uses double your ram, which is not usually needed, some run with no page file if they have 16GB but I don't recommend that. I have mine as system managed with 16GB ram and it is only 1GB right now on Win8.1, it changes depending on what I am running and it should on your PC too so don't know why it is using such a large pagefile.

Click to expand...

I'll check into what it's set at. I haven't done anything custom so I would assume it's the Windows default. This computer is only turned on to game or add keys to steam. I just happened to turn it on this morning to remove a few game programs (Arc and some other crap program) and noticed the free space was low. Shouldn't windows clear it on each restart or is that not good with an ssd drive? I remember there were some recommended things to not happen with ssd drives as os but that could be different in this day and age with tech etc.

scgt1 said:

So I've been noticing my Corsair OS ssd has been having severe space dwindling away. I'm down to like 7 gigs free on a 120 gig drive (97 after format and split for the System partition). I thought the page file went to the system partition and left your normal OS install drive alone?

Well anyway after going through temp folders, windows download folders, etc and clearing out trash I went from 5 gig free up to 7 gig. There has got to be something going on still. My Steam games all install onto their own 4TB drive other then the stupid documents and my saved files that Steam likes to stick on your OS drive. (Dumb as hell)

I select every folder on my C: drive and check the properties. Only using 60G on disk. Well where the hell is the other 30 some odd gigs then? I then went and selected to show hidden OS files and sure enough the Page file is at some 33+ gigs. This seems insane!

Any ideas? Running Win 7 X64 with ssd drive for the OS.

I might add that I had 16 gig or ram but just upgraded to 32gig yesterday prior to even noticing this problem. Other then the space dwindling away over time.

Click to expand...

With 32 GB of ram and System Managed page file, a 33GB ish Page File is about right.

If your OS drive is an SSD, I would recommend setting the page file minimal to 800MB and maximum to say 8000MB. That way the page file will always be 800MB unless it needs it for something. It should shrink back to 800MB when you reboot.

It doesn't matter how much memory you have, you should never disable the Page File.

If you've got 32GB of RAM nowadays (and even when you had "just 16" all you'd require is setting a static page file (same size min/max) of about 1GB (1024MB) or even using the 800MB that bigdogchris just mentioned. There's no real gain to having it be expandable anymore as that just creates more overhead while the OS is trying to actively do that and find room for any potential data it might actually try to page. I just got a workstation laptop with 16GB in it and I've been hitting it quite hard the past few days stress testing it in a variety of ways - I have two hard drives in it, both have a 1GB static page file on them, and after doing some performance monitoring (because of the 16GB of RAM) Windows doesn't even bother with the page file so far, not even when I had it literally using about 15.8GB of physical RAM with some 3D work/Photoshop RAW edits (very very large images like 12K x 12K resolution).

With 32GB of RAM some folks will say "oh hell, just disable the page file and be done with it..." but Windows and all modern OSes are designed to work with a page file as part of the virtual memory subsystem so it's best left enabled but constricted by making it static and no larger than 1GB at most. I seriously doubt you'll ever have any issues with 1GB static page files - one on every physical drive you have (as long as they're not in RAID situations) means the system is just more efficient overall because it can read/write from one page file while doing the same from another if needed. No matter how fast storage devices are getting, they still can't do reads and writes at the same time so, it's one or the other unless you take advantage of having multiple physical drives and being able to read/write from them discretely and individually at the same time.

Hope this helps...

If your choice is between leaving the reduced size pagefile on the SSD or moving it to a HDD, leave it on the SSD, because SSDs excel at the type of disk access that make a pagefile work well.

That did it. It was on system managed (probably win 7 install default) On my daily server it's manually set 200mb/1024mb. That is with win 10 but I think my Samsung Magician software did that change with the longevity setting for the ssd drive. I haven't had any issues with running out of memory errors on it. The game rig now has 800mb/1000mb for My COS) DGeneric games) and ESteam games) drives. The only one I didn't set anything on is that system reserved partition.

On my SSD with Windows 8.1 set to manage the page file it is always 2GB, while I have 32GB of RAM. I think Windows 8.1 is smart enough to treat SSDs with respect.

According to Samsung if you have more than 4GB ram installed and are using a SSD you should change your page file to 200MB with a maximum of 2GB. From a quick Google search I did not find any results on what Corsair recommends.

Off topic: Samsung Magician 4.9.6 has been released

If you set the pagefile small enough, Windows will tell you the minimum amount of pagefile necessary for a system memory dump file to be created during a system crash, usually around 700MB-800MB. I use that amount.

Download Windirstat and see what files are taking up space