How bad is it to have the pagefile on a SSD?

[kami]

I guess this is really a question about how often the pagefile will be writing in terms of GB/day under relatively heavy usage (multi-tasking) and gaming with Vista64 and 6GB of ram. I'm getting an X25-M and I know SSDs can only write so much.

I know the intel's are rated at 100GB of writes per day for 5 years but honestly I really have no idea how often the pagefile reads and writes data back and forth to memory. I can see there being performance benefits having the temp files and pagefile on the SSD but if it's going to kill the drive in a year I'd probably avoid it. On a notebook I really wouldn't think much of it but this is a heavily used desktop running games and memory intensive apps.

Any suggestions? I'm probably overreacting but its a big purchase.

 

[taltamir]

i think it will be better than a regular drive on the intel...
Also, intel has an algorithm that caps the speed for the rest of the day if you wrote more than 20GB that day, so that you will NEVER use it up before 5 years are up.

Pagefile really shouldn't be all that much writing per day.

Almost everyone who has gotten an SSD has the pagefile on it (because it is the only drive in their laptop / os drive in desktop) and they haven't had any trouble yet AFAIK. get plenty of ram though.

 

[Nothinman]

I guess this is really a question about how often the pagefile will be writing in terms of GB/day under relatively heavy usage (multi-tasking) and gaming with Vista64 and 6GB of ram

Only you can answer that question, everyone's usage patterns are different. Startup perfmon and monitor your pagefile activity for a few days and see how much you really hit it.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: taltamir
i think it will be better than a regular drive on the intel...
Also, intel has an algorithm that caps the speed for the rest of the day if you wrote more than 20GB that day, so that you will NEVER use it up before 5 years are up.

I would really love if Anandtech (or pcperspective, etc) took up the challenge of putting an X25M under an endurance test where they write >100GB a day for days and days, say 30 or 60 days and monitor the performance degradation (if any) that came from this dynamic intentional "performance manager".

It seems like one of those things that really needs to be further scrutinized as 20GB/day is really not all that excessive for people doing video work.

 

[hans007]

it depends on what you run on your computer.

page file will page out ram , to "disk" to free up physical ram (this is a lot because people do not like seeing their ram "used up" even though it in theory could just stay in there, which is partly what vista was trying to do but people are idiots and said it wasted too many resources)

that said, you can force a program in windows to page out anything noti n use right now. the windows memory manager can do it too automatically if something needs ram right now, and other unused portions of another program are just not currently needing it.

now if you are up to your physical ram limit there will be a lot of paging programs in and out every time the scheduler task switches. say you ran i dont know 10 programs taking up 200mb ram each, and you only had 1gb ram and 1 gb of page.


That said, the solution is to just buy more ram and turn paging off completely. If you want to avoid this entirely , just turn paging off and buy like 8gb of ram. usually the default windows setting is 2 x the page size for real ram.

 

[sxr7171]

Originally posted by: taltamir
i think it will be better than a regular drive on the intel...
Also, intel has an algorithm that caps the speed for the rest of the day if you wrote more than 20GB that day, so that you will NEVER use it up before 5 years are up.

Pagefile really shouldn't be all that much writing per day.

Almost everyone who has gotten an SSD has the pagefile on it (because it is the only drive in their laptop / os drive in desktop) and they haven't had any trouble yet AFAIK. get plenty of ram though.

Well the key word in your statement is "shouldn't" but how do we know for sure?

I limited my pagefile to 128MB only and put 4GB RAM. When 4GB SODIMMs get cheap I will make it 8GB. In any case I've had no problems with 4GB.

 

[sxr7171]

Originally posted by: Idontcare

Originally posted by: taltamir
i think it will be better than a regular drive on the intel...
Also, intel has an algorithm that caps the speed for the rest of the day if you wrote more than 20GB that day, so that you will NEVER use it up before 5 years are up.

I would really love if Anandtech (or pcperspective, etc) took up the challenge of putting an X25M under an endurance test where they write >100GB a day for days and days, say 30 or 60 days and monitor the performance degradation (if any) that came from this dynamic intentional "performance manager".

It seems like one of those things that really needs to be further scrutinized as 20GB/day is really not all that excessive for people doing video work.

I think by the time they do that, it will hopefully be irrelevant. There better be a new Intel drive or FW that institutes Trim, enlarges caches and MUCH more intelligently addresses the issues we are finding about NAND flash as an OS drive. Win 7 needs to also do much more. The FWs need to get better at leveling and distributing data and really the SSD needs to zero out it's own blank space and maintain itself at peak performance. Right now it seems every solution is to some degree or another a kludge. For the time being if they do not have hardware cheap enough to this, then I would prefer one of my 4 cores being used to do intelligent leveling and maintenance in software through the driver. I think the CPU cycles used will still offer a great benefit from a cost/benefit perspective.

 

[alcoholbob]

I don't think anyone has really experimented on the typical behavior of pagefile writes. For example, do files in RAM get written to disk whenever they are switched to background apps? (i.e, alt-tabbing). If that were true, rapid application switching would hit the hard drive rather significantly.

 

[Zap]

Originally posted by: hans007
If you want to avoid this entirely , just turn paging off and buy like 8gb of ram. usually the default windows setting is 2 x the page size for real ram.

I'm not sure that is a good idea. I've played around with that before and seems as if some programs expect it to exist, and either don't run or run really crappy without it but is fine even with a tiny swap. Other software ends up running a bit faster.

Alternately use a RAM drive and put the swap on that.

 

[Old Hippie]

Alternately use a RAM drive and put the swap on that.

I'm using Virtual Hard Drive 2 Pro.

It was a little cheaper.

 

[Nothinman]

I don't think anyone has really experimented on the typical behavior of pagefile writes. For example, do files in RAM get written to disk whenever they are switched to background apps? (i.e, alt-tabbing). If that were true, rapid application switching would hit the hard drive rather significantly.

No, that's not how it works. The only thing that goes to the pagefile is stuff that doesn't already have a backing store on disk and that only happens when memory is getting low. When you minimize an app Windows will trim the process' working state, but that doesn't mean anything will actually get written to the pagefile.

Alternately use a RAM drive and put the swap on that.

Worst idea ever...