 Wily_OnePremium
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA | [WIN7] Pagefile and SSD Short story: Was running XP, lost a hard drive, got an SSD (120GB OCZ) and installed Win7. All good. HDD replacement finally came, so I'll be moving My Documents, reinstalling my games and whatnot to the HDD.
Now the age-old question: What to set for the pagefile, and whether to leave it on the boot drive (the SSD) or move it to the HDD? My concern is of course the longevity of the SSD and worry about paging causing excessive read/write cycles.
I've seen conflicting opinions on this topic. Some say absolutely get it off the SSD, others say it won't be a problem, including one post I saw from a Microsoft tech who said statistical analysis shows the pagefile in fact does not cause excessive read/writes. And then there's some that say no pagefile is needed at all, but I know Windows doesn't really like it when there is no pagefile for crash dumps and so forth.
I have 4GB of RAM, the current pagefile is dynamic ("let Windows manage") but seems to remain a constant 4GB.
Opinions? |
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 dvd536as Mr. Pink as they comePremium
join:2001-04-27
Phoenix, AZ
kudos:4 | Put it on the hard disk drive. even if some say minimal reads/writes, SSD life isn't going to be as long as a traditional hdd, no sense in shortening the ssds life unnecessarily when you can move it to hdd. |
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 Vchat20Landing is the REAL challengePremium
join:2003-09-16
Columbus, OH | reply to Wily_One
I've had a cheap 64GB OCZ Solid 3 with the latest firmware in my notebook since October and running SSD Life. Default settings of Win7 including default pagefile settings left on the SSD (2GB physical ram) and the usual prefetch/etc tweaks.
SSD Life reads a combined 5.6TB of reads and writes (2.3 read, 3.3 written). Still estimating 8 years, 2 months, and 22 days of life up to April 26, 2020 which is only a few days shorter than it was when Windows was first install.
My personal anecdote? The pagefile will not irreparably harm a properly configured SSD (Trim enabled, defrag disabled, all the usual registry prefetch tweaks and junk) more than normal Windows operation will. And my guess is the SSD will outlive any possible expectations or needs you may have of it. I am a fairly frugal person and am plenty happy with the estimated life expectancy. More than likely this notebook will be long gone and replaced with something with likely a much larger and cheaper SSD option once that date comes around.
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I swear, some people should have pace-makers installed to free up the resources. Breathing and heart beat taxes their whole system, all of their brain cells wasted on life support.-two bit brains, and the second bit is wasted on parity! ~head_spaz |
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Wily_OnePremium
join:2002-11-24
San Jose, CA | I found the link to that MS post I referenced earlier:
quote:
...given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.
»blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009···and.aspx |
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 RyanPremium
join:2001-03-03
Quincy, MA | reply to Wily_One
Pagefile on the ssd is the way to go! Even with the pagefile on the drive it should last a long time, long enough for you to swap out to a larger drive for a quarter of the price you pay now anyway  |
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