Move PageFile to another disk

Question

I would like to remove the pagefile from my SSD drive to my 1TB hard drive. The answer below goes a long way to solving the problem.

How can I move the page file to another physical disk location?

However the answer by Camille suggests that even if I move the pagefile to my hard drive that windows will still create a pagefile on the system drive in order to write kernel memory dumps in the event of a crash.

1.) As a rule of thumb approximately how big is this page file for Kernel memory dumps compared to the pagefile that is moved to the hard drive?

2.) What would happen if I removed this Kernel Memory dump pagefile from my SSD as shown by Camille? I've never managed to use anything from a memory dump in which case is it fair to say I would not miss it?

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/314482

3.) Microsoft seem to suggest that you should put the pagefile in a partition on the 2nd drive. I have used on 10GB out of 1000GB on my 2nd drive so far would it still be possible to partition this? If I am unable to partition will this create a big problem in terms of moving the pagefile to the hard drive?

4.) What would be the optimal solution in my case?

Move the pagefile to a partition on 2nd hard drive while keeping the Kernel memory dump page file of my SSD.

Or as above but removing the Kernel memory dump pagefile from my SSD?

Thanks

Answer 1

It depends on what kind of dumps you want. Windows will not create a page file if you have told it not to create one. For dumps to work, the page file for the boot disk must either be specified larger than the following sizes, or it must be system-managed and either already larger than the following sizes, or have enough free space on the disk to grow to the following sizes:

• If you just want mini-dumps, then create a page file on your boot disk with a size of 2 MiB
• If you want full kernel dumps, then create a page file on your boot disk with a size of 2060 MiB (A little over 2 GiB)

Otherwise, dumps will not be saved when the system encounters a BSOD. This is not by any means bad, it just will limit your ability to diagnose BSODs.

The reason for using a separate partition is to reduce fragmentation of the page file. Ideally, it should be allocated as one massive block on disk. A separate partition is one way to do this, but it's usually just fine to set it to a shared partition as long as the partition has lots of free space and is defragmented before Windows creates the file. After it's created, it will be fine.

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I don't know how big your SSD is or how much free space you have, but in your situation, I would probably create a 3 GiB (3072 MiB) page file on the SSD, and then create a system-managed page file on your 2nd drive.