SSD question

[Bozo]

If a SSD is used as the boot drive, would it be smart to move the pagefile (swapfile) to a different drive? Wouldn't it help with the wear?

 

[LunarMist]

Why would you want to do that unless there are two SSDs? How much data will be written to the SSD other than the pagefile?

 

[timwhit]

I would leave the pagefile on the SSD, this will certainly help performance.

 

[Mercutio]

Assuming that the machine has a decent amount of RAM, I'd move it to prevent a bunch of pointless wear on the SSD.

 

[timwhit]

Even with a lot of RAM Windows still pages quite a bit, especially if you leave applications running for long periods of time. I think I'd rather take the wear and have the performance.

 

[LunarMist]

Assuming the SSD has a modern controller, what are you saving it for, posterity? :batman:

 

[Mercutio]

Even with a lot of RAM Windows still pages quite a bit, especially if you leave applications running for long periods of time. I think I'd rather take the wear and have the performance.

The way Windows paging works, it uses the disk that has been configured with a pagefile with the lowest queue length. My assumption is that a data drive is going to be relatively idle while the SSD probably has at least some active IO going on, and everything important enough to have an impact on memory is going to stay in RAM all the time anyway.

I've tried it both ways and not been able to tell when paging was happening, so I'll take a drive that might live longer.

 

[Mercutio]

Assuming the SSD has a modern controller, what are you saving it for, posterity?

Call me a nut but I'm just not a fan of data loss.

 

[LunarMist]

What about notebooks? The vast majority have only one drive. SSDs work fine in them, pagefile and all.

 

[Mercutio]

What about notebooks? The vast majority have only one drive. SSDs work fine in them, pagefile and all.

My Thinkpads have a nifty little 2GB readyboost module I can use for that but more to the point, Bozo really seemed to be talking about systems with more than one drive.

 

[time]

Assuming it's Windows 7, why not just disable the page file altogether?

 

[ddrueding]

Assuming it's Windows 7, why not just disable the page file altogether?

If you have enough RAM (and at these prices, it's silly not to), then there isn't much point worrying about page files. All my laptops have 8GB, and the workstations are 16GB or 24GB.

 

[sechs]

If a SSD is used as the boot drive, would it be smart to move the pagefile (swapfile) to a different drive? Wouldn't it help with the wear?

This is backwards thinking. If you want to reduce the wear on your drive, don't use it to boot. Heck, don't even put it in your computer.

My advice has been, and continues to be, if you care, but a page file on each physical drive, and Windows will figure it out. If you have "a lot" of memory, it's probably not worth worrying about.

I have 8GB in my main machine and average about one page fault an hour. For all practical purposes, that's going out to disk never.

 

[Stereodude]

I recently moved my pagefile under Windows XP to my Intel 80GB G2 SSD. I had left it on one of my two spinning disk RAID-1 arrays, but under some uses like copying data between the two spinning disks arrays system would lag as the pagefile would get starved for access. After I moved it and rebooted the system stopped lagging under the exact same circumstances (as expected). FWIW, I've got 4GB of RAM in the system.

The way I figure it, the SSD is rated for 35TB of data writes over 5 years. After 15 months I've written a whopping 1.49TB to the drive, so I'm not worried about it. The worst thing that happens is I'm forced to buy a newer bigger and faster SSD. :rofl:

 

[LunarMist]

How is that 35TB rating calculated? I have close to 20TB on the 32GB X-25E in slightly over 2 years of use. :dwarf:

 

[Stereodude]

How is that 35TB rating calculated? I have close to 20TB on the 32GB X-25E in slightly over 2 years of use. :dwarf:

20GB a day for 5 years I think. The 32GB X-25E has a slightly higher rating of 1PB of random writes.

 

[LunarMist]

Sometimes I would have 20GB of writes in five minutes.

PB is much better.

 

[Stereodude]

Sometimes I would have 20GB of writes in five minutes.

Well, I'm guessing we have slightly different usage patterns.

 

[LunarMist]

I bought it for write/read usage, not to look at.

 

[time]

Zing ... ouch! :rr:

I also enjoyed Stereodude's dry witticism. Will there be a third round?

 

[Stereodude]

I bought it for write/read usage, not to look at.

I bought mine for a boot drive, not to sit around reading and writing files to it at a rate of 20GB per 5 min.

 

[LunarMist]

I had an X25-M G2 for the boot drive before the existence of the force drives and it is OK for that. 2+ years ago most computers only had 8GB of RAM and now many have 16-24 GB so there is even less pagefile usage.

 

[MaxBurn]

My intel G2 says 1.5TB host writes and media wearout indicator of 98, not worried about using this thing up at all. I made the argument on another forum that even with media wearout they are still going to have a longer and more reliable life on average over mechanical drives.

 

[Howell]

At the very least it should be more predictable.

 

[Howell]

*predictable EOL.