# paging and hibernation files



## Draconas (Jul 10, 2012)

I have windows 7 and 3 hard drives, an ssd and a mechanical paired together with ISRT (enhanced mode) and a drive that's meant for backups and fraps.

Since the SSD's read only, trying to write any paging or hibernating crap is totally up to the main HDD, which is a problem when the disk takes around 3 minutes to complete this and my UPS drains so fast that it'll think the battery has faulted, so I know I can move the paging file location fairly easy and move it to the third drive, hibernation file is up in the air with this one when I got mixed results from google.

My question is: If I move these system files to the non system disk, and that disk fails, what happens then? Does the computer sees that disk is kaput and attempt to move it back to the system drive, or will it pull a "you're shit out of luck"?


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## Elim Garak (Jul 10, 2012)

I have paging file disabled, its useless with more then 8GB of memory.
Anyways if the disk fails and gets removed I believe it will disable paging till set again and hiberation, worst that could happen is losing your session.


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## Draconas (Jul 10, 2012)

I got 16GB of ram, but since my browser alone uses around 5GB (addons and tabs x.x) plus any other crap that adds up, I don't feel safe to disable paging. Since it doesnt sound like some catastrophic thing if I end up loosing the paging file, I'll move it on over I guess.


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## LizardKing (Jul 10, 2012)

Draconas said:


> my browser alone uses around 5GB



What the fuck?


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## Draconas (Jul 10, 2012)

LizardKing said:


> What the fuck?


44 extensions, at least 30 tabs open at any given time, and it being google chrome, I actually was not surprised it uses that much.


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## LizardKing (Jul 10, 2012)

Draconas said:


> 44 extensions, at least 30 tabs open at any given time, and it being google chrome, I actually was not surprised it uses that much.



That's it? I was expecting you to say you had about 1,000 tabs open. I opened 50 tabs and barely hit 500MB. I can't understand how you managed 5GB unless every one of those tabs is filled with 100mb Flash/Java applets or something. Or you have some seriously bloated extensions. Seriously. 5GB. Wow.


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## Draconas (Jul 10, 2012)

LizardKing said:


> That's it? I was expecting you to say you had about 1,000 tabs open. I opened 50 tabs and barely hit 500MB. I can't understand how you managed 5GB unless every one of those tabs is filled with 100mb Flash/Java applets or something. Or you have some seriously bloated extensions. Seriously. 5GB. Wow.



I'm guesstimating 5GB, having my browser closed I hit 2GB, having it opened bumped me to 5GB, think 12 hours of continuous use bumped the total ram usage to 7GB(-2GB from that brings me to the 5GB i gave)


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## BRN (Jul 10, 2012)

Draconas said:


> I'm guesstimating 5GB, having my browser closed I hit 2GB, having it opened bumped me to 5GB, think 12 hours of continuous use bumped the total ram usage to 7GB(-2GB from that brings me to the 5GB i gave)



It might have sounded like a decent guess, but to say it really used 5GB is incredible. You might due suit to look up your actual memory allocation through Task Manager some time. >.>


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## Lobar (Jul 10, 2012)

Why is your SSD read-only?  The super-fast write times are pretty much the reason to even get an SSD.

edit: okay, I missed it's a hybrid drive, it's not truly read-only, you just have it set up to be a read buffer only.  Try switching to maximized mode.



Elim Garak said:


> I have paging file disabled, its useless with more then 8GB of memory.
> Anyways if the disk fails and gets removed I believe it will disable paging till set again and hiberation, worst that could happen is losing your session.



Don't disable your pagefile.


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## Elim Garak (Jul 10, 2012)

Lobar said:


> Why is your SSD read-only?  The super-fast write times are pretty much the reason to even get an SSD.
> 
> edit: okay, I missed it's a hybrid drive, it's not truly read-only, you just have it set up to be a read buffer only.  Try switching to maximized mode.
> 
> ...


Never had any issues with this over the last year or so....running with 12 GB of ram though.
Anyways your choice, however DO NOT PUT IT ON AN SSD, it will lower the life time a lot.
I don't hit 95% of memory normally even with BF3 or other shit running that's know for memory leaks


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## Lobar (Jul 10, 2012)

Elim Garak said:


> Anyways your choice, however DO NOT PUT IT ON AN SSD, it will lower the life time a lot.



Write exhaustion isn't nearly as much of a problem for current SSDs as it was for the first generation, nowadays you'll burn out the controller long before write exhaustion becomes a problem.  Even the early ones didn't have a significantly shorter lifespan than traditional HDDs.


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## Draconas (Jul 10, 2012)

When I had my SSD in maximized mode and suffered an issue where windows couldn't use the raid drivers, I had a very slim chance that the system would boot in IDE mode and start rebuilding drivers all the way back up to be able to use it, this has happened multiple times and went with enhanced mode, so that I don't have to spend a 30'th weekend installing windows, updating it, installing all my other shit, and configure it all, plus it's not like I really benefit from writing faster, especially when the paging file (31GB minimum) would take up half the SSD.

ISRT is done to where I think it handles any files that are below 1GB, with an extensive filter of what files to not cache (why would anyone need to cache MP3s?)


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## Runefox (Jul 10, 2012)

@Draconas: Why would you ever need a 31GB minimum page file?

You SHOULD have a page file, but a small, ~1GB page file should be more than enough for a computer with 8GB+ worth of RAM. Windows will expand it in the unlikely event that there's a need to do so, and beyond that, it's not going to enhance performance in any way.

As for the page file on Windows, I imagine that if the drive the page file was on were to crash and burn, Windows would take that about as well as the system drive crashing and burning. Though I guess that all depends on what's in the page file at the time.

On that note, you should probably drop some of those extensions, because that's obviously where your RAM is going when you launch your browser. Try typing about:memory into Firefox, or clicking the wrench icon in Chrome, then going to Tools->Task Manager to see what extensions are eating up your memory needlessly.


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## Draconas (Jul 11, 2012)

Runefox said:


> @Draconas: Why would you ever need a 31GB minimum page file?



I opted for "let windows manage it" option, which it deemed 31GB necessary.


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## kayfox (Jul 11, 2012)

In response to the people saying you should disable the page file:
http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it

Generally I think this is best answered by asking the question: Do you think your smarter than the people who wrote the Windows memory manager.  Remember, were talking some of the top computer scientists in the world here.


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## Elim Garak (Jul 11, 2012)

So 





kayfox said:


> In response to the people saying you should disable the page file:
> http://lifehacker.com/5426041/understanding-the-windows-pagefile-and-why-you-shouldnt-disable-it
> 
> Generally I think this is best answered by asking the question: Do you think your smarter than the people who wrote the Windows memory manager.  Remember, were talking some of the top computer scientists in the world here.



That was already linked. Anyways calling programmers at Microsoft top computer scientists is far stretched, talented yes, top scientists not really. I honestly have no issues with it either way. Also programs usually are made with the low end hardware in mind. I disabled other features as well for disk space and resources.


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## Leafblower29 (Jul 11, 2012)

Elim Garak said:


> I have paging file disabled, its useless with more then 8GB of memory.


For an average user, yes. For video editing? Absolutely not.


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## Draconas (Jul 11, 2012)

Leafblower29 said:


> For an average user, yes. For video editing? Absolutely not.



I do video editing  it's mostly video game commentary.


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## kayfox (Jul 12, 2012)

Elim Garak said:


> Anyways calling programmers at Microsoft top computer scientists is far stretched, talented yes, top scientists not really. I honestly have no issues with it either way. Also programs usually are made with the low end hardware in mind. I disabled other features as well for disk space and resources.



Pray tell who then employs the best of the Architects?


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## Elim Garak (Jul 12, 2012)

kayfox said:


> Pray tell who then employs the best of the Architects?



Microsoft has scientists working on new technologies in their r&d division rather than the programmers, generally computer science is separate from the day to day programming. Anyways, they have good programmers but so do a lot of other places, some even work for nothing and they contribute to open source projects.


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## Ricky (Jul 13, 2012)

What the hell are you doing on your computer?

Wait, I don't want to know.

If you do less of it though, your problem might go away (and that's probably a good thing on many fronts).


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## Commiecomrade (Jul 14, 2012)

OP has 500 porn flash animations open.

But seriously... 5GB on a browser... Could you drop 40 useless apps and not have a billion tabs open at once? I never have more than about 4 tabs open during regular use. Just steal those songs you have open on your veritable Youtube music library if you don't want to pay.


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## kayfox (Jul 14, 2012)

Commiecomrade said:


> But seriously... 5GB on a browser...



I kinda wonder what browser you could get to 5GB on, other than IE 64-bit, because as far as I have seen at least Firefox and Opera have no 64 bit versions.*

So to answer the OPs question: If the disk that your paging file is on fails, the system may fail with a bugcheck/STOP/BSOD.

If you don't use a paging file your applications will die with cryptic and unpredictable errors when memory is exhausted.  This shouldn't be as violent as it is on the network machinery I work on, but it still will suck.  Modern Windows applications are not written to handle memory allocation calls failing, and may not even have a handler for that.  For example, Opera will lock up, and Firefox seems to tend towards terminating without any messages, Photoshop will actually tell you it cant allocate memory, but once you click Okay, it closes without saving your work.  The paging file is the padding that keeps these things from happening to the average user, they just end up with slow machines and don't quite understand why.

* For Windows, on IRIX there have been a few Mozilla builds that were 64-bit, and I'm sure Linux has 64-bit builds of Firefox, etc, etc.


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## Draconas (Jul 14, 2012)

Commiecomrade said:


> OP has 500 porn flash animations open.


Uncalled for :/



Commiecomrade said:


> But seriously... 5GB on a browser... Could you drop 40 useless apps and not have a billion tabs open at once? I never have more than about 4 tabs open during regular use. Just steal those songs you have open on your veritable Youtube music library if you don't want to pay.



I use all those tabs and apps on a regular basis, and I sure as hell don't download shitty quality music from youtube.


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