Should the Page File Be Put on a SSD?

[teknology9]

Hi All,

I have been reading few articles about this subject and wondered what your take was on the matter. First of all I came across this article titled the optimisation guide:

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives...

In here it states:

"Yes.Most pagefile operations are small random reads  or larger sequential writes, both are operations that SSD's handle well."

On read a post made by DM, I came across this:

"As long as you have over 8GB or RAM you don't need a swapfile/pagefile. If you feel that you can't live without one put it on the other drive."


Can anyone shed some light on this.

Teknology9

[absic]

Hi there,

Yes, the first item is correct but what it doesn't state is that SSD's, in general, have a finite amount of write cycles. This varies according to the make and model of the SSD's but too many write cycles will shorten their working life.

This is why the advice is to disable or relocate the pagefile to another drive. With 8GB of RAM you can safely disable the paging file as your RAM will handle these operations without a problem.

If however, you want to keep a large paging file then you can set it onto a standard HDD within your system (if you have one) installed, rather than on the SSD.
You can do this by going to:
Control Panel/System and Security/System and then clicking on the link in the blue left hand panel of the screen named Advanced system settings.
This will bring up a dialogue box and you need to click on the button labelled "settings" under the performance heading (should be the first button in the box).
Another dialogue box will open and you need to click on the Advanced Tab and then under the Virtual Memory heading click on the button labelled "Change..." Here you can set the size of the Pagefile or set it to use a different drive in your system.

[Dark Mantis]

Hi

Unlike the older magnetic disk type of drive SSDs do have a limited life measured in the number of writes to a particular point on the chips. Therefore anything that is writing to the drive when it can be done away with is a good idea. The numbers are fairly substantial but even so a pagefile can make a significant number each day.

[teknology9]

Yes...thanks for your replies.

I am not disagreeing with what you are both stating...it's just that have done a bit of research some say leave it on the SSD...others put it on a HDD.....me....I'm .

Another suggestion was to input 0 and see what figure Win 7 shows and input that as the size of the pagefile as that figure for both minimum and maximum.

The size of the page file on my SSD is 12288mb....is that to big...just right etc?

Thanks,

Teknology9

[absic]

If you're happy with the pagefile taking up that much space on your SSD then that's fine. Remember, the internet has good as well as bad advice, when I researched this subject I spoke to several manufacturers and they advised turning off the paging file on the SSD.

I have mine set to Off across all drives and have had no problems or loss in speed.

[teknology9]

OK...I see. So even with all your programs and applications....there are no problems? Yes I really want to get some space back if possible.


@Dark Mantis - Hi, I know what you have written has got a lot of merit....so don't misunderstand as it's all good.

Thanks


Teknologgy9

[absic]

As you can see from this image, on my system, everything to do with the pagefile has been turned off and there are no speed issue with any of the programmes that I run.

[teknology9]

Hi,

Well.....I......I.....think that has answered that one!!!!!


Thanks absic

Cheers,

Teknology9

[Dark Mantis]

The only downside to not having a pagefile at all is that in the event of a problem there will be no dump to check on afterwards. 

[absic]

Problems? ? What are they? 

[Dark Mantis]

None now that you are using a real system!

[absic]

Touche, DM. 

Sadly, even having moved to the dark side, I am still encountering issues (not problems, I hasten to add) and they can't all be down to my lack of experience of Intel.

[Dark Mantis]

Post them up here absic maybe we can work through them. There are a lot of experienced people on this forum!

[absic]

Post them up here absic maybe we can work through them. There are a lot of experienced people on this forum!

Ah, I like to play with things and try to find the solutions through trial and error so that I am in a position to help others. And, as I have said, it has been a long time since I played with an Intel rig so some of the issues are probably of my own making!

Although, I have to say, that I am wondering about the F8b BIOS I am running as, although I am running everything at stock settings, I get the odd occasion when the system will reset at BOOT and tell me it has reset itself due to overclocking.  Very strange, especially as, when I go into BIOS and check, everything is exactly the same as before.

[Dark Mantis]

Yes I have had the same error message on some of my machines and personally I reckon it's just because the stupid computer can't think of anything else to blame it on! As you say often nothing is overclocked at all even the memory.