Help me understand some anomalies with how windows pagefile allocation works

[Chesschamp09]

So I've been playing around with my pagefile because I would prefer it to be on my secondary HDD rather than SSD (even tho theres pros and cons and it really isn't that important to do so), and I've come across behavior that doesn't much make sense to me.

When both drives have no page file set:

windows creates temp pagefile on secondary HDD; doesn't appear to actual be use since the commit limit still appears to be 16GB


When only HDD has pagefile set (tried min 1GB, max 5GB and system decides options):

~2GB size temp pagefile put on primary SSD by windows; one allocated for HDD either doesn't
exist or will show up but seem not to be recognized or used


When 16MB pagefile on SSD and anything set on HDD:

no error causing creation of temp pagefile, and both pagefiles supposedly exist, but windows
appears to only use the pagefile on the SSD as far as I can tell (when using a lot of memory the
commit charge appears about as full as the memory and it turns a lot of the memory into
"modified" type in resource monitor)


So why will it allocate a pagefile on the SSD when I have one set for the HDD only, but will create one on the HDD when I have no pagefile allocated? Additionally, why do some of the pagefiles that have system file allocations not appear to actually be used sometimes?

 

[Chesschamp09]

Yes as far as I can tell, Windows will not recognize a pagefile on my non-primary drive at all. If I go to task manager in the memory section, my "Committed" max amount, which is physical RAM + VRAM from my understanding, is only a function of the size of the pagefile on the primary C drive