I moved my Windows page file off my main SSD, and my drive stopped doing work it never needed to do

Published Sep 1, 2026, 7:01 AM EDT Abhinav pivoted from a career in banking to pursue his first love in writing. Even while working full-time, he continued contributing as an editor-at-large, a role he has held for more than 7 years. A lifelong tech enthusiast who has built three gaming and productivity powerhouse PCs since 2018, his passion for technology keeps him closely following the semiconductor industry, from NVIDIA and AMD to ARM. His MSc dissertation explored how artificial intelligence will reshape the future of work, reflecting his curiosity about the wider social impact of emerging technologies. It probably will not come as a surprise to most when I say that your Windows boot drive has enough on its plate. It handles the OS, applications, Windows updates, caches, temporary files, telemetry, and the list goes on and on. As such, it is useful to offload some of these tasks when it's possible, and most users start with pagefile.sys, since it is one of the few high-write files Windows lets you relocate without trouble. Most users build their PCs around two SSDs, and if you're one of them, you have a second drive with capacity to spare and no real reason not to point Windows at it. That's exactly what I decided to do a few weeks back. Before migrating your pagefile, it's worth knowing what it does It does three jobs, and only one is about your RAM Before we delve into moving your pagefile to another drive, it helps to understand what you're actually moving. The pagefile.sys is a system file that Windows creates for three things, including virtual memory, supporting the system's commit limit, and of course, crash-dump support. Windows can move infrequently accessed modified pages from physical system memory to the pagefile, which, in the process, frees RAM for data that needs to be accessed on the fly. The OS also tracks memory that is committed to running processes, and the commit limit is determined by available physical memory and the capacity of the pagefiles. If the system hits that limit, Windows cannot satisfy further memory commitments, regardless of how much RAM might appear to be available at a glance. This is when you see freezes, out-of-memory errors, and the occasional crash. None of that is pleasant to see on your machine. When it comes to crash-dump support, the function is quite vital and worth understanding. Without a pagefile of the right size, Windows may not be able to write certain memory dumps when something goes wrong, leaving you with a BSOD and little useful information to diagnose the issue. Windows, therefore, manages the pagefile automatically by default, adjusting its size and letting it grow up to three times your installed RAM or up to 4GB (whichever is larger). This is one of the reasons why some users see this file swell up to tens of gigabytes in size. What's the benefit to moving your pagefile to another drive? It's subtle, but also not recommended in every case Contrary to what many on user forums believe, moving the pagefile doesn't make the RAM or the OS faster itself, and it won't turn a second SSD into a performance upgrade either. The benefit is a little subtle, in that, by doing this, you separate paging activity from the other work your primary drive is already handling. When Windows requires paging data, the read and write activity have to be handled by whichever drive hosts pagefile.sys. If that's the boot drive (as it usually is, by default) those operations are competing for the same storage resources as Windows, applications, software updates, cache, and other everyday files. Therefore, migrating the pagefile to a separate drive gives another room for the activity to occur, and your OS drive is free from the read and write activity occurring in the background. There are circumstances where you'd be better off avoiding moving the pagefile, though, and exploring alternative optimization methods. If your PC already has plenty of system memory (say, 32GB of RAM or more) and rarely pages, you're unlikely to see noticeable benefit to this, which renders the exercise moot. Another case where it's generally unadvisable to move the pagefile is when your secondary drive is a lot slower than your main drive. For example, it's generally okay to move the pagefile from an NVMe SSD to a SATA SSD, but not from a SATA SSD to an HDD because of the difference in random IOPS. Moving the pagefile to a slower drive could make the paging process itself slower. How to move your pagefile to another drive the right way A couple of steps and a reboot is all it takes Although it sounds complicated, moving the pagefile to your secondary drive is simple and can be done natively through Windows. The first thing you'd want to do is use Search to find View advanced system settings and open it. Then, you'd want to find the Performance tab and click on Settings. This should take you to a new window, where you have to switch to Advanced and find Virtual memory. Here, you have to click Change and untick the option to Automatically manage paging file size for all drives. Then, select the designated drive you have selected to move the pagefile to, choose System managed size, and click on Set to save this. Finally, you now have to select your boot drive, choose No paging file, and click Set again. Once all of that is done, click Ok through the remaining windows and reboot your PC. Your boot drive will be a little less busy, and thank you for it Windows 11 has plenty of background activity and processes competing for storage, and the pagefile is one of the few Windows files you can move with a few clicks in a consequence-free way. If you happen to have a second drive with the headroom for it, it can take a workload off the boot drive. It's a rather sensible way to divide labor between your storage devices, and it costs you nothing except for ten minutes of your time.