Paging File on boot SSD or second HDD?

[SnakeJG]

My only experience with an SSD is in my work notebook. My usage is very multitasking and memory intensive, and the SSD has improved things greatly for me. Context switching between programs just happens, where before upgrading to the SSD, it could take up to ten seconds thanks to the slow 5400 rpm notebook drive.

So, I know that a paging file on the SSD makes my setup fly, but I was recently reading this article ( http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/windows-7-and-ssds-cutting-your-system-drive-down-to-size/2941?pg=1 ) and on the third page, he talks about moving the paging file to the secondary hard drive, as if it was a valid choice for some setups.

For those of you with SSD boot/HDD data setups, can you notice the difference if you put the paging file only on the SSD or only on the HDD?

Thanks,
SnakeJG

 

[Fedaykin311]

The only reason to move the swap to the second HDD drive is to save wear on the SSD.

You will definitely notice a difference if your machine is actually using swap space.

 

[Makaveli]

I've moved it to secondary drive for the above reason.

With that and browser caches moved off my ssd i've manage to write about 1.2TB's in host writes in about one years worth of use. However its more of a personal preference for me. You will have people telling you the best place to put an page file is on a SSD etc etc.

 

[smakme7757]

I've also moved my Pagefile to my second HDD and off the SSD. But i did come into a problem, my second HDD was called Applications and had the drive letter A:.

I kept getting and error stating Windows couldn't load the page file when i booted into Windows. Then i found out why: If the second hard drive has the drive letter of A or B windows will give you an error upon boot because it somehow reserves A and B for floppy drives while loading the OS and won't check the drives for a page file.

Strange, but a true story!

However its more of a personal preference for me. You will have people telling you the best place to put an page file is on a SSD etc etc.

Performance wise it's a good idea, but i didn't notice much of a difference having the pagefile on my 2nd HDD rather than the SSD though.

 

[Nothinman]

My only experience with an SSD is in my work notebook. My usage is very multitasking and memory intensive, and the SSD has improved things greatly for me. Context switching between programs just happens, where before upgrading to the SSD, it could take up to ten seconds thanks to the slow 5400 rpm notebook drive.

So, I know that a paging file on the SSD makes my setup fly, but I was recently reading this article ( http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/windows-7-and-ssds-cutting-your-system-drive-down-to-size/2941?pg=1 ) and on the third page, he talks about moving the paging file to the secondary hard drive, as if it was a valid choice for some setups.

For those of you with SSD boot/HDD data setups, can you notice the difference if you put the paging file only on the SSD or only on the HDD?

Thanks,
SnakeJG

If you have enough memory that you're not touching the pagefile it will save space on the SSD and not affect performance, but if not then you're taking a big performance hit every time a page is needed from the pagefile.

 

[corkyg]

Nothinman puts his finger right on the problem. If you have enough real memory, then you will rarely ever need a page file unless you are big time into video processing. I really can't say when my page file was last used.

 

[Baasha]

Nothinman puts his finger right on the problem. If you have enough real memory, then you will rarely ever need a page file unless you are big time into video processing. I really can't say when my page file was last used.

That's very interesting. I have 12GB of memory and do quite a bit of photo/video editing as well as gaming.

My OS drive is actually 2 SSDs in RAID0 with total capacity of 64GB (59.5GB real) so I moved my PageFile to another "regular" HDD. I mentioned in another thread I created that I felt my SSDs, especially two in RAID0, seem abysmally slow.

Do you think that having moved the PageFile to a HDD, my SSDs took a performance hit even though I have 12GB of RAM?

 

[Nothinman]

That's very interesting. I have 12GB of memory and do quite a bit of photo/video editing as well as gaming.

My OS drive is actually 2 SSDs in RAID0 with total capacity of 64GB (59.5GB real) so I moved my PageFile to another "regular" HDD. I mentioned in another thread I created that I felt my SSDs, especially two in RAID0, seem abysmally slow.

Do you think that having moved the PageFile to a HDD, my SSDs took a performance hit even though I have 12GB of RAM?

The SSDs themselves won't be affected by the pagefile location, but if your commit charge is high enough that you're using the pagefile then application responsiveness and performance will suffer whenever something needs paged to/from the pagefile.

 

[SickBeast]

I have 12gb of ram and I simply disable the swap file entirely. No crashes so far, and my system seems a little bit more responsive.

 

[Auric]

It is generally preferred for a working drive to have 64kB clusters but that would result in a performance penalty for a pagefile expecting 4kB. And in any case the location on the drive further affects performance so ideally a seperate partition at the beginning (and 4kB formatted) would be used if desirable over simply having on the OS drive. Of course if the pagefile is actually accessed then it conflicts with any other disk usage.

One option to reduce wear is to use memory for browser cache. Although, it is more likely not worth worrying about in the first place.

 

[Nothinman]

I have 12gb of ram and I simply disable the swap file entirely. No crashes so far, and my system seems a little bit more responsive.

Which is a questionable practice at best...

 

[fuzzymath10]

I set mine to a bit more than the minimum Windows suggests (maybe 500MB) and keep it on the SSD. It will hardly get used with a lot of memory and 500MB isn't a lot even on a small SSD.

 

[Dadofamunky]

I'm in the total opposite camp. I want my SSD to last, so no swap files on there for me. I don't think I'll see any significant hit because a) the disks the swap is on are RAIDed; b) I plan to expand my memory soon. I don't think anything I do in Photoshop, Premiere or with encoding is going to care very much.

I wonder if we could have enough RAM (say, 24 GB) so that we could allocate 8-12 GB as a RAM disk and set that up as the Windows swap drive. I wonder if anyone has done this. There's gotta be a way.

 

[LiuKangBakinPie]

Um disable your page file. For serious video edititng you use a scratch disk. It makes use of the disks caches and works faster on a SATA raid setup.

 

[SnakeJG]

So, it looks like opinions are rather divided on the page file issue. If anyone has the time and inclination to do some actual stopwatch tests, that would be great.

A couple of you brought up wear worries. I've had my Intel 80 GB Gen2 drive for 6 months now as my only drive, and it has 1.2 TB of host writes on it. The drive is supposed to handle a minimum of 35 TB of host writes. So, at my current rate (about 6.7 GB/day), my drive should last at least 14 and a half years. I don't think the small number of writes caused by the page file will be enough to make a difference in your SSD's life, unless you have an older model with horrible write amplification.

 

[Aikouka]

Meh, I just put it on the SSD. Chances are I'm barely harming its life expectancy anyway.

 

[McLovin]

So, it looks like opinions are rather divided on the page file issue. If anyone has the time and inclination to do some actual stopwatch tests, that would be great.

A couple of you brought up wear worries. I've had my Intel 80 GB Gen2 drive for 6 months now as my only drive, and it has 1.2 TB of host writes on it. The drive is supposed to handle a minimum of 35 TB of host writes. So, at my current rate (about 6.7 GB/day), my drive should last at least 14 and a half years. I don't think the small number of writes caused by the page file will be enough to make a difference in your SSD's life, unless you have an older model with horrible write amplification.

Holy Lurker Batman!

 

[smakme7757]

I tried turning the pagefile off completely but suffered stuttering in Starcraft 2, otherwise my system performed very well. Seeing as i enjoy playing SC2 when i get the chance i just enabled the page file and slapped it on my 2nd HDD. No crucial loss in terms of HDD space for a stutter free SC2 experience at 166fps 🙂.

 

[Nothinman]

I wonder if we could have enough RAM (say, 24 GB) so that we could allocate 8-12 GB as a RAM disk and set that up as the Windows swap drive. I wonder if anyone has done this. There's gotta be a way.

Someone always mentions this and it's the absolute worst thing you could do. The pagefile is there to alleviate memory pressure, so removing memory in order to do that is completely backwards. Despite what people may think, the Windows kernel developers really do know more about memory management than all of us combined. It's a very complicated subject and applying a RAM disk like duct tape is just a terrible idea.

So, it looks like opinions are rather divided on the page file issue. If anyone has the time and inclination to do some actual stopwatch tests, that would be great.

Opinions are divided because lots of vocal people don't understand memory management. If you really want to measure the effect just crank up perfmon and watch your pagefile usage over time. As long as you have enough memory to handle your workload's commit charge it will be minimal.

 

[Arsynic]

Nothinman puts his finger right on the problem. If you have enough real memory, then you will rarely ever need a page file unless you are big time into video processing. I really can't say when my page file was last used.

Not necessarily true. It depends on the application. No matter how much memory you have, some applications like games will give you a low memory error if your pagefile is too small. Other applications and games don't care.

 

[Tsavo]

Meh, I just put it on the SSD. Chances are I'm barely harming its life expectancy anyway.

Same here. My average is 7.3 GB/day since I bought mine, and average that will likely decrease to 6 GB/day and stay there forever.

 

[Tsavo]

Someone always mentions this and it's the absolute worst thing you could do. The pagefile is there to alleviate memory pressure, so removing memory in order to do that is completely backwards. Despite what people may think, the Windows kernel developers really do know more about memory management than all of us combined. It's a very complicated subject and applying a RAM disk like duct tape is just a terrible idea.



Opinions are divided because lots of vocal people don't understand memory management. If you really want to measure the effect just crank up perfmon and watch your pagefile usage over time. As long as you have enough memory to handle your workload's commit charge it will be minimal.

^ That.

I wonder if SoftRam 95 is compatible with Windows 7. 😉

 

[Nothinman]

Not necessarily true. It depends on the application. No matter how much memory you have, some applications like games will give you a low memory error if your pagefile is too small. Other applications and games don't care.

I wouldn't be surprised if the game tries to do a huge, worst case allocation ahead of time in order to prevent problems in-game and that's what triggers the low memory error. But with AMD64 a 64-bit process has 64TB of VM to play with and I really doubt you'll have enough memory in your system to cover that...

 

[cytg111]

It's a very complicated subject and applying a RAM disk like duct tape is just a terrible idea.

- Some very productive solutions has been implemented with duct tape, to ignore the power of duct tape is upthere with "the magic man did it", wich trips right over the ".. Windows kernel developers really do know.." ... kernel devs being magic men. For all that we know, the reason for physical pagefile might be backwars compatability with a win3.11 app or whatever.

I say, duct-tape that shit(pagefile) to a ramdrive, test before and after and if it works out for the better then all hail the sacret duct tape.

 

[Nothinman]

- Some very productive solutions has been implemented with duct tape, to ignore the power of duct tape is upthere with "the magic man did it", wich trips right over the ".. Windows kernel developers really do know.." ... kernel devs being magic men. For all that we know, the reason for physical pagefile might be backwars compatability with a win3.11 app or whatever.

I say, duct-tape that shit(pagefile) to a ramdrive, test before and after and if it works out for the better then all hail the sacret duct tape.

No, it's not magic, the pagefile is used as a backing store for data that has no other storage besides main memory. It's one of multiple locations that data can be paged to/from during normal operation and while it's not a hard requirement for virtual memory to work, but it's a really stupid idea to run without one. Much like a net for a trapeze artist. And artificially limiting 1 resource, memory in this case, in the name of making more of it available is a pretty bad idea as well.