General Tech Notes

A SSD (solid state drive) is the best investment you can make to increase the performance of your computer.  ( in a sign of getting old ) I have the habit of always making a fixed pagefile ( swapfile ) on a secondary hard drive for an extra performance tweak.  Traditionally this was faster because when the operating system decided it needed more RAM and began to swap parts of RAM to the hard drive to make room, it left the primary drive open for reads and writes.  The second part was to make a fixed size swap file rather than a dynamic swap.  This allowed you to put the swap file on the outside of the platter ( first ) where it had the maximum transfer rate and prevented fragmentation for faster random access.

While this general practice still might make sense for a second drive, if the drive is an SSD, it may occur a pentalty as it ages.  

SSD ( solid state drives ) have no moving parts and random access is fast because there is no delay waiting for the right part of the platter to come around.  Their disadvantage comes in a limited number of writes per memory cell.  To work around this, the drive does not always use the 'first' memory cell for writes.  If you erase a file, then write another file, it will try to use the 'least used' memory cell to average out the lifespan.

So in the case of a SSD and pagefiles, it may make more sense to let the operating system dynamically allocate the pagefile.  I don't know enough about how the fixed page files are initiated on a reboot, so it may not matter.  Either way, I don't really see a reason to make a fixed page file anymore.  YMMV.

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