pagefile on external HDD

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princeboy47

Limp Gawd
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Aug 30, 2019
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hi there, i have been thinking on ways to further increase the storage performance on my pc. i had this idea, if it will actually work. if i foreverly attached a USB 3.0 hard drive to my pc to work as pagefile seperate drive to ease the main drive usage as well, is this supported by windows 10 first of all, having pagefile out of the main drive and used actually by windows? if so, will it boost the performance even a little?
 
I would hazard a guess that USB 3.0 bandwidth is less than the bandwidth to your internal hard drive. Whatever (minute) benefit you'd get by relieving the seek access to your hard drive would be mitigated by the massive latency introduced by the USB 3.0 connection.
 
Algrim said:
I would hazard a guess that USB 3.0 bandwidth is less than the bandwidth to your internal hard drive. Whatever (minute) benefit you'd get by relieving the seek access to your hard drive would be mitigated by the massive latency introduced by the USB 3.0 connection.
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what about readyboost? i already got 24gb of actual ram. and i disabled pagefile, prefetch amd superfetch. will readyboost be of difference?
 
princeboy47 said:
what about readyboost? i already got 24gb of actual ram. and i disabled pagefile, prefetch amd superfetch. will readyboost be of difference?
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I think you've already been given some pretty clear answers.
I've tested readyboost and other USB 3 based cache tools years ago and in short - you're wasting your time.
They're really aimed at low performance systems where it's your only real option.
Follow the advice given - install more memory if needed and keep your pagefile off of USB 3 drives.
If you've got spare cash, the best solution is moving the pagefile to a second internal SSD drive (i.e. not the one hosting the OS), but obviously you need a second drive for that (or an SSD stripe set if you want to spend more cash).
 
princeboy47 said:
what about readyboost? i already got 24gb of actual ram. and i disabled pagefile, prefetch amd superfetch. will readyboost be of difference?
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Stop following bad tweaks
I Dont know why you want to have you ram full of junk and unused data. but its not helping on your performance


You are better of just symlinking some less used dat to your external drive. than starting to move pagefiler over there or disabling it
 
Let Windows do it's thing .. your "tweaks" will end up slowing down your setup. Save your external for doing backups or something of the sort so you can roll back your setup after you hose it with the "just tweaking" ;)
 
princeboy47 said:
just tweaking B-D
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Disablign pagefile is not a tweak. anyone advertising that has not idea on how the windows memory system works.
Prefecth and superfetch are less of an issues but still don't see that benefit you in anyway to disable it

Pagefile increases your RAM efficiency thats its purpose. disabling forced unused data to stay in your ram and thereby have less available RAM for important data
 
Prefetch is a ramdisk teechnically so it's funny that people feel the need to disable it and add another)
 
You have 24 GB of memory, right? Then leave everything as the defaults. It's been a good decade or so since anyone really needed to tweak their settings. Windows 10 actually does a very good job of managing your system resources, building on the improvements that Windows 8 put in place.
 
DeaconFrost said:
You have 24 GB of memory, right? Then leave everything as the defaults. It's been a good decade or so since anyone really needed to tweak their settings. Windows 10 actually does a very good job of managing your system resources, building on the improvements that Windows 8 put in place.
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Windows 10 has nothing to do with this. These tweaks where misunderstood from the "Birth" of them. ppl wanting to sound smart on forums and provided absolutely no evidential backup.

just see the long debate on SMT4 and windows 10.
Som guy was adamant and did tons of postabout version 1903 Trying to convince me. ( I did not have 1903 to test)
Despite multiple request he never provide any shred of evidence.
Once i got 1903 on my laptop it took me 5 mins to check it and provide numbers

But see he didn't want to seek the truth. He just wanted to be right on a forum... and this is where we get all this misinformation from.
 
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Going back to the XP days, there were some rare situations where you could manually set some options to help, especially if you did a lot of paging. Those days have LONG since passed. OSes have improved. New ways of thinking were to be had (hopefully). Gone were the days of trying to use as little system resources. I still remember the tweaking guides that minimized RAM usage. You add memory to use....not to "not" use.

Testing this on Windows 10 was pointless because the idea of tweaking these settings died out LONG ago.
 
Having the pagefile on faster disks is part of the performance boost in itself. I would not place it anywhere else besides another SSD but then that's kind of wasteful. I know in gen 1 Hyper-V VMs it wouldn't even allow the pagefile onto a synthetic SCSI controller VHD and it may be possible Windows doesn't allow it to be on removable media but even if it does, USB is a lot less reliable than people think so would jeopardize stability.
 
If your concern is space usage, might try moving the temp and download folders to the external drive. If you are after speed, then keep as much as possible on the fastest drive(s). Windows since V7SP1 has done a good job of automagically handling pagefile allocations and HD performance setups.
 
Moving pagefile to external HDD wont be beneficial if you using SSD as OS drive. Because SSD is faster. Better get a cheap 120GB nvme and use it solely for pagefile if You want to do something different.
 
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