Switch to SSD or not?

[badnewcastle]

I have a WD 1TB Black SATA II.

Upgrading to this:
2600k
Asrock P67 Extreme6
G.Skill 1600 4 x 4GB
Corsair AX850
Corsair Obsidian 650D
Radeon 6970 or 6950... still up in the air

Nevermind there was a rebate on the Vertex 3 120GB $30 off ending today... so I being the gutless sucker I am.. ordered one on Amazon.

 

[Carfax83]

Get ready to be jumped by the geek squad because you had the nerve to still be using a hardrive

In all seriousness though, I myself have delayed switching over to SSDs because the price/capacity ratio doesn't suit me as of yet.

In the mean time, having a shit load of memory (which is very cheap at the moment) and turning the pagefile off will help mitigate the performance issues associated with mechanical drives in a very significant way.

That is if you decide you want to wait a bit longer like I did.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Get ready to be jumped by the geek squad because you had the nerve to still be using a hardrive

In all seriousness though, I myself have delayed switching over to SSDs because the price/capacity ratio doesn't suit me as of yet.

In the mean time, having a shit load of memory (which is very cheap at the moment) and turning the pagefile off will help mitigate the performance issues associated with mechanical drives in a very significant way.

That is if you decide you want to wait a bit longer like I did.

I'd follow the same wisdom. But I'm stunned completely by what you can do with the Z68 chipset, ISRT and any SATA-III SSD on the low-capacity end paired with a $50 hard disk.

Figure you could spend $120 on an SSD that fills that bill, put it together with even a Samsung F3, and you can count your blessings not only in dollars-per-gigabyte but dollars per MB/s.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Normal Desktop use, it's worth it, for gaming - lol

Congrats!

 

[trungma]

Why do people keep insisting on turning off the page file?? Is there any benchmarks to back up these claims of better performance?

 

[badnewcastle]

Why do people keep insisting on turning off the page file?? Is there any benchmarks to back up these claims of better performance?

In the limited reading I've done, I thought it was for stability.

 

[razel]

I don't remember seeing much that proved it either way, but as a programmer I'm against disabling it. Why? Windows Vista/7 has the option to start it off at 16MB and allow it to grow to a max which helps you find out whether you need it or not. You can check if it's grown just before you reboot or shutdown. There is also a '% Usage Peak' in the Performance Monitor which again in Vista/7 is crazy easy to setup a schedule task or a write a quick VB that you can double click to check usage.

 

[fastman]

I just made the switch and love it! Boot-up, running apps, installs and even web browsing are all faster. I did a fresh install from XP to 64bit Win7. Although this was from 150G Raptor the increased speed was easily noticeable. My new SSD is a Intel X25-M 120G, do it you won't regret it.

 

[Emulex]

yeah man two microcenter G2 in raid-0 is the bomb for cheaps. $144 (open box * 2) = 500megabit read/writes

 

[theevilsharpie]

Why do people keep insisting on turning off the page file?? Is there any benchmarks to back up these claims of better performance?

The only legitimate reason I can give for disabling the page file is if you're low on disk space and need the space for other purposes.

 

[wtfbollos]

switch and external the 1tb..

 

[wtfbollos]

Why do people keep insisting on turning off the page file?? Is there any benchmarks to back up these claims of better performance?

i'd like to know this as well, i've never got to the bottom of that one..

it's nice to be able to liberate the os from farting about with one if it has enough hard ram tho i would have thought?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

Normal Desktop use, it's worth it, for gaming - lol

Congrats!

Was that in response to my remarks about ISRT and HDD acceleration?

I can see your point -- "for gaming - lol. . ." Maybe . . . but suppose the cache size is larger? How much "stuff" are you going to run through -- from your hard disk -- with a game? What would it mean to use the maximum cache size with gaming throughput? 64 GB is a lot of space . .

 

[beginner99]

The only legitimate reason I can give for disabling the page file is if you're low on disk space and need the space for other purposes.

The reason is speed. Pagefile is nothing else than stuff that doesn't fit in your RAM (=virtual memory). Since these will normally be small files and read/writes using a normal HDD will be extremely slow. And if you or the OS is reading or writing other stuff, well you can get annoying stuttering issues.If you turn it of, this obviously can't happen. The downside is you system will probably insta-crash if you do not have enough RAM.

This is plain theory. If in the real world you will see much difference? No Idea. However you sure do with an SSD. Especially on laptops were price differences between CPUs are also huge. (like 200-300$ between an i5 and i7 dual core). get the "slow" cpu and ssd. System will feel a lot faster and more responsive.

 

[FishAk]

The reason (to turn off the page file) is speed.

This doesn't fit with my understanding.

If you don't have enough memory, and you turn off paging, and then your system crashes because it can't swap out a file, how is this faster? The best case is that you must reboot- which takes time-, and worse case, you must reboot, but also you loose data. This costs even more time. I understand this can happen this can happen even if you do have enough memory.

If you do have enough memory, and you keep the page file turned on, your system will not swap files, because there is no need. The worst case is that for some reason, the system will need to swap some files and will slow down. But that is still much faster than crashing, and safer too.

Sure, you will have a 16MB (or whatever minimum size you specify) file sitting on your drive doing nothing, but 16MB is not so much. It seams like good insurance.

 

[Burner27]

The only adjustment to the pagefile I can see making is setting the min and max size to the same amount so that it doesn't take more space than you would like. I can see this being done by those who purchase 64GB and smaller SSDs if you need to manage space. Even then, I would probably disable hibernation first and get back that space before modifying the pagefile parameters.

 

[theevilsharpie]

The reason is speed. Pagefile is nothing else than stuff that doesn't fit in your RAM (=virtual memory). Since these will normally be small files and read/writes using a normal HDD will be extremely slow. And if you or the OS is reading or writing other stuff, well you can get annoying stuttering issues.If you turn it of, this obviously can't happen.

During normal (i.e., not memory constrained) operation, Windows will only be writing memory pages to the page file, so that all pages stored in physical memory are backed by pages in the page file (space permitting). These writes have a lower priority than program I/O, so you shouldn't see any performance decrease unless there's something wrong with your drive.

 

[Emulex]

but if you have 16gb of ram and can afford it - you shouldn't need to page at all. the first step before paging should be ram compression, then page

 

[wtfbollos]

get the "slow" cpu and ssd. System will feel a lot faster and more responsive.

:thumbsup: