I have just purchased servers with a large amount of memory (128gb) for a SQL installation. For the OS only, there are two 146gb drives mirrored, with a hot spare. After I installed the OS, I looked at the free space and it's down to 1.7 gb. Obviously, this is the page file that I didn't figure into the installation on the 146gb drives. Does the page file really need to be this large with this amount of memory? My SQL installation will be on a SAN. I thought about putting the page file on the SAN, but those are slower disks right now than the 146, 15k drives that I have installed locally. On the SAN, I will create a quarum volume (active\passive cluster) and also an additional SQL volume. In the future, these will be 15k drives in the SAN, but for now we don't have them available. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I would like to know what I should do to alleviate the "out of space" issue on the OS installation. Thanks in advance!

No you do not need such a large size of page file. System will automatically set the size of the page file nearly equal to the size of physical memory. You can change it to a small size. Here is a website which provided explaination about page file: http://www.petri.co.il/pagefile_optimization.htm Please Note: Since the web site is not hosted by Microsoft, the link may change without notice. Microsoft does not guarantee the accuracy of this information.Shaon Shan |TechNet Subscriber Support in forum |If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com

I actually found this article before I posted the question. It suggests to create a page file @ 1.5 x the RAM. It suggests not decreasing the page file size under this 1.5 ratio. So, my question still stands. With this large amount of memory, what should I set the page file size at per my first post? It I don't decrease the size, my OS drive is out of space.

This link describes how to calculate the appropriate page file size. It also suggests you may not need a page file if your system has a large amount of memory http://support.microsoft.com/kb/889654 MCSE helping out when time permits

Roy is right. The "1.5 ratio" generally provided to computers which do not have large memory. For your current situation you do not need a large page file.Shaon Shan |TechNet Subscriber Support in forum |If you have any feedback on our support, please contact tngfb@microsoft.com

Well just like Roy said, you don't need to have a page file size of 1.5 x Memory you can reduce it to 10 Gigs or something but i would not recommend you to create the page file on a SAN. It might cause issue.