Nothing. Do absolutely nothing. Just don't run defrag and don't even "align" the drive. Just let it run.

Check all the fans and make sure it is not getting too hot.

You're thinking spinning disk, where there are performance implications to fragmentation. Taking that out of the equation changes the game; the ideal pagefile is the smallest one you can get away with at any given moment.

-IF- you use hibernate, move it.

10 million interrupts per second seems like a hell of a lot. If it takes of the order of a few hundred instructions to service an interrupt, that's more than one CPU core's worth.

That and a dirty video card.

Hell, even the mouse starts to seem like it's asleep at the wheel in the sense that if you move the mouse the cursor doesn't always respond.

Let Windows 7 do its thing and the rest of us should be fine.

So do I even need a page file for a system that has 8 or 12 GBs of RAM?

7 will pretty much handle this stuff automatically such as disabling automatic defrag on the disk, disabling superfetch, and other system services unnecessary on an ssd.

It so happens that I often chat to a senior guy where I work whose job in part involves figuring out the impact of various disk technologies on our product line. And he tells me it does make a difference. Unfortunately his reports aren't public.

Misalignment is mostly a write problem, and more so on a not-new drive. (You can't overwrite an SSD block; the controller needs to allocate an erased block, and schedule the old one for erasure.)

FWIW, not all SSDs are equal. Different controllers choose to optimize for (note rare example of correct usage of the word) different scenarios.

So do I even need a page file for a system that has 8 or 12 GBs of RAM?

Is it just me or did Fred test the wrong thing.

If not aligned, WRITEs are a problem
- a write can cause two SSD blocks to need to be updated, which is an unnecessary update to a flash memory block. Life-1 for no reason
- a write update to two blocks is going to take more time than a write to one block

So, testing read speeds is going to show either of these things how, exactly?

quote:

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The throughput times of the misaligned-versus-aligned SSD produced the following results:
Random-access read
Before alignment: 149.2 megabytes per second (MBs)
After alignment: 150.0 MBs
Sequential read
Before: 278 MBs
After: 277 MBs
Windows Experience Index
Before and after: 7.9 (The scale goes only to 8.) Bootup and shut down
No perceptible change.
And so on

In every area I looked at, I could detect no meaningful difference in the SSD's aligned and misaligned performance.
These results make sense if alignment-performance issues are mostly related to drive mechanics. When a traditional platter drive is misaligned, its heads might have to make additional movements to completely read or write data to each sector. With a single file using hundreds or even thousands of sectors, those extra movements could add up to a significant amount of time.

SSDs, on the other hand, have no platters or heads. Whether the sectors are aligned or not, accessing different memory addresses in an SSD's RAM takes almost no time at all. So it's not surprising that aligning the sectors on my SSD showed no significant performance improvement.

Drive alignment might have better results with other configurations heavy, constant database lookups; conventional, mechanical drives; or RAID systems. Your results might also be different if your drive is formatted with tools that handle alignment differently or not at all.

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