JMicron SSD for pagefile?

[aken909]

So... on my i7 that I built in January I thought i'd get ahead of the game and go SSD, I thought I did a lot of research and I think people didn't really know the skipping problem or at least the cause of it yet.

Long story short I use windows 7 I had the skipping problem, so I got four 7200 rpm's and put them in two raid 0's (os and programs), sadly I have definitely lost some of the zip in program opening and w7 loading.

But the real question is what to do with the SSD, can I use it as a pagefile?
Or would that be bad given its failure at random i/o's?

 

[Denithor]

That would be, quite simply, the worst possible use for an SSD with a jmicron controller. For exactly the reason you mentioned.

The files typically written into the pagefile are tiny 4k or less - precisely the sort of files that give these drives nightmares and absolutely shitty performance.

What you might try instead is a clean install of Win7 on the SSD and put your pagefile and temp folders on a regular HDD. That way you potentially get the fast boots of the SSD and minimize the small files that get written onto it.

You should also go read on the OCZ forums for all the various tweaks and tricks used to minimize the problems with these SSDs. With enough work I think they got these drives nearly usable.

 

[aken909]

Yeah I read the OCZ stuff, and it didn't help. Its a faulty controller, and besides, I mean when you turn off all that stuff your kinda taking a step back anyways.
I'm happy with the raid setup I got going its stable and reliable and larger things like games load faster anyways as the raid has higher sustained throughput. And installing is WAY faster too.

I did also try moving the pagefile, but that also didn't help.

My normal computing that blew up the ssd involves streaming movies over the network to my xbox onto my tv and doing that while say downloading a file was just to much for the poor thing.

Oh well, at least I have the most expensive paper weight in the house!

edited:
Oh yeah, thanks for the reply!

Sadly I pretty much knew the answer before I posted =)

 

[glugglug]

Actually it might work pretty well.
Pagefile reads are pretty much random access and mostly 4K. Pagefile writes are usually in 256KB-2MB blocks, which if you are lucky might even be aligned with SSD blocks.

 

[VaultDweller]

Originally posted by: Denithor
The files typically written into the pagefile are tiny 4k or less - precisely the sort of files that give these drives nightmares and absolutely shitty performance.

Windows only writes to the page file in relatively large blocks - page file performance is driver largely by random reads and sequential writes.

That said, I don't see much value in using an SSD as a page file - adding more RAM would be much better, and RAM is cheap. I guess since the OP already has the drive it could be worth giving a try, though.

 

[aken909]

Well, before I posted for a few days I had the ssd as the pagefile. I have 6 gb ram so I have also tried no pagefile. TBH nothing even slightly noticeably changes no matter how its setup. Windows 7 seems to do a pretty good job of handling the pagefile

 

[Denithor]

More likely with 6GB Win7 doesn't even use the pagefile for general apps.

Either way could you use that drive to hold your games or whatever instead of the OS? Should be a noticeable boost for load times/large textures/etc without the stutter problems (gaming is mostly just about read speeds, very little writing).