World of Tanks + SSD with PageFile = write thrashing

[GlacierFreeze]

This seemed like it would get lost in the WoT thread and might have needed its own thread. If not, feel free to merge it, or move it to the Memory and Storage section if more relevant there.

Anyway, built a new system a few months ago with specs in sig. Haven't updated video card yet though.

Most seem to say for SSD that 10GB writes per day is fine and it will last a while, but even light/moderate usage won't hit that much. I tend to keep an eye on Samsung Magician to see how many writes have been done and I've noticed that it seems to increase .01 TB/day (10GB/day) pretty much everyday. One day it would say 0.54 TB written, and the next day it will show 0.55TB written. I thought that was extremely odd considering the only thing I do is check Facebook, email, etc, and about the only game I play right now is World of Tanks.

Well after several weeks, and apparently several hundred GB of writes (currently at 0.71 TB written; SMART Wear Indicator 1 at ~0.54), I decided to open up Win7 Resource Manager and leave Disk Activity open with Writes sorted showing highest to lowest. While in game (WoT), it looks like there's a constant stream of about ~1MB/s being written (Queue Depth ~2) to the PageFile, which means if I play for 4 hours, that's a ridiculous 14GB written just for playing a game.

I know most people who have 8GB or more of RAM turn PageFile completely off, but I decided to leave a small 500MB one since it complains about not being able to write certain logs/events if there is no PageFile. Well having one on your SSD and playing WoT is apparently not a good idea. After I noticed that I'm getting a crazy amount of writes for doing next to nothing on a day to day basis, and finally figuring out what is causing it, I moved that PageFile to my Velociraptor.

Just figured some of you maybe interested in knowing this....

 

[Nintendesert]

I have had serious issues with WOT lately with stuttering, hitching and random short freezes. I'm not sure if it was related to this, but the game really is coded like a pig. Thanks for the headsup. I'll have to disable my pagefile and see if it helps.

 

[GlacierFreeze]

You may want to keep an eye on your writes, as a test, to see if it disabling PageFile works as well for minimizing writes as it will for me moving it to another disk.

I say that, because seems like I remember people saying that even if you disable PageFile that Windows still uses it. Or I could be misremembering.... But I'm sure disabling it will work just as well.

 

[Nintendesert]

I disabled it and tried a few games, there's still some hitches with the green/red latency blinking light, which might mean their servers are simply crap. The writes to my SSD however were at 0 according to Win8.1's Resource Monitor. I'll assume that's accurate.

 

[GlacierFreeze]

Good to hear then. Thanks for testing that.

 

[CrackRabbit]

I disabled it and tried a few games, there's still some hitches with the green/red latency blinking light, which might mean their servers are simply crap. The writes to my SSD however were at 0 according to Win8.1's Resource Monitor. I'll assume that's accurate.

I have that problem too, I just assumed it was something with my wireless network. Good to know I'm not the only one.

GlacierFreeze, it might not be a bad idea to invest in a standard mechanical hard disk for things like the page file and storage. I have an old WD Raptor that was given to me that works wonderfully for stuff like that.