SSD vs pagefile

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mintydroid

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I have switched off the pagefile side of my Windows 7 64 bit for quiet some leaving just the 4 gig ddr2 ram built into the laptop as the only available memory to load stuff. The purpose of my exercise was to see if my system would still be stable if I switched off the pagefile as suggested on the internet to save writes to the nand on a ssd should I go ahead and purchase one.

Quite often the system would just stall and a restart was in order.

Am I correct in saying that my laptop would not fair well with pagefile off and a ssd installed?
 
With 8gb+ Ram, turning it off would be better. 4gb is not much these days thus you will run into problems.

I have 16gb ram and a SSD with my page file turned off, no issues :)
 
Also run 16GB ram, going to try turning off the paging file as well
 
I'm only running 6GB ram without a page file. No issues.
 
I only really experience problems when I load apps or have a lot of them open with the pagefile off.

I've checked the laptop specs on crucial and the manufacturers website and they both say it's not upgradable.
 
If you have Windows 7 (or is it 7 SP1?) or later, you don't need to do anything if you install an SSD. Windows is smart enough to detect it, and apply the correct settings. Generally, you shouldn't be messing with the page file. It only made sense in older systems, that didn't recognise the difference between SSDs and magnetic disks, and for older SSDs that had a limited number of read/write operations. For modern SSDs and operating systems, you shouldn't have to do anything, except possibly to double check that disk defragmentation is turned off.

There are a number of articles from reputable sources with info about this. I can't remember them, but a quick Google search should turn them up.
 
On systems with 4GB or 8GB of RAM, I'd leave the pagefile on even with a SSD. It benefits you to have it there because of the much faster read times and the handful of applications that may need it. Windows 7 and 8/8.1 are smart enough to only use the pagefile when it is more efficient to do so. Disabling it was required on XP and Vista would only stop paging to the hard drive every 5 seconds when you were on 16GB of RAM.

Put it back on and set it to minimum 512MB and max of 1024MB, which should be more than enough for anything you'll be doing on your system.
 
I really wouldn't worry about writes to a SSD anymore. Those were issues with some of the very early SSDs, but the latest ones are great.
With only 4GB of RAM, I really wouldn't recommend running without a pagefile. One of the most important jobs of the pagefile is to provide a space for Windows to "defrag" your RAM. If you don't have a pagefile, you can't fully utilize your RAM.

Generally I find running an SSD with a large pagefile gives better performance than additional RAM.

With previous versions of Windows it was best practice to have a page file that was 1.5 times RAM as they stored a copy of everything in the pagefile and at the same time, needed extra space for re-arranging. Since Vista, this hasn't really been necessary and it's better to let the computer decide how much pagefile to use.
 
The pagefile on an SSD is lightning quick. Don't worry about wearing the drive out, it's a bunch of FUD.

If you have a 120 GB SSD rated at a piddly 3,000 P/E cycles you're looking at a rated lifespan of 120 GB * 3,000 = 360,000 GB = 351.5 TB of writes. If you're writing 50 GB to the pagefile every day (that's a huge amount, but let's roll with it) you're looking at 7,200 days to exhaust its rated lifespan, or almost 20 years. There's a massive thread on XtremeSystems where people have done extensive testing and found that most exceed their rated lifespan by a HUGE margin.

Disabling the pagefile was recommended in the early days of SSDs because crappy controllers led to stuttering during massive write operations. These issues were ironed out about half a decade ago already, but someone the recommendation was misinterpreted as being done to save the NAND chips from wearing out. There's no harm in leaving the pagefile enabled.
 
I am thinking about adding a SSD to my laptop, but I run a lot of my stuff in VM's. I have moved my main dev to Win7 although I do boot into XP occasionally, and will be putting in Server 2008 as well.

The question is, how does VM's cope with paging? Each of these VM's will have an internal page file which would be part of the allocated space for the virtual drive. Will it not thrash the SSD?
 
All the more reason to use an SSD as a mechanical drive is just going to keel over and die (not literally, it'll be slow). How many VMs will you run?
 
Oj0 said:
Disabling the pagefile was recommended in the early days of SSDs because crappy controllers led to stuttering during massive write operations. These issues were ironed out about half a decade ago already, but someone the recommendation was misinterpreted as being done to save the NAND chips from wearing out. There's no harm in leaving the pagefile enabled.
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Actually this was a problem with some Sandforce, Phison and JMicron controllers as early as 2010 still. Paging at the same time as you were writing to the drive and reading all at once would increase the queue depth and the Phison and JMicron controllers would have to re-do several write cycles because the cache wasn't being flushed fast enough. Since paging operations weren't compressible, Sandforce drives would also drop in write speed. This has been fixed since 2011 for the most part, but a lot of people still have second and third-gen hardware that does this.

Although I've only really seen this personally in machines with 4GB or less RAM. Today it doesn't matter.

Vis1/0N said:
I am thinking about adding a SSD to my laptop, but I run a lot of my stuff in VM's. I have moved my main dev to Win7 although I do boot into XP occasionally, and will be putting in Server 2008 as well.

The question is, how does VM's cope with paging? Each of these VM's will have an internal page file which would be part of the allocated space for the virtual drive. Will it not thrash the SSD?
Click to expand...

Not really, the paging operations in those VM's won't be a problem. What you may want to do is make sure that the VM software is set to only save data changes when you close the VM, not replace the entire VM file on the drive when you finish working with it.

SSD's are definitely much more preferable for VM work though, definitely think about getting one. Spring for a 500GB drive if you can afford one because you'll appreciate the extra space and the write speed.
 
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You say 2010, I said about half a decade ago, I hate to break it to you but 2010 was almost half a decade ago :( :(

Regardless of us saying the same thing, my point is that it was never because of NAND being fragile :D

I don't know you, did you ever work with Neo? Long time friend of mine :)
 
Oj0 said:
You say 2010, I said about half a decade ago, I hate to break it to you but 2010 was almost half a decade ago :( :(

Regardless of us saying the same thing, my point is that it was never because of NAND being fragile :D
Click to expand...

Eh, I mentioned it because I had to sell the damn things and I knew what was going to happen. Oh well. xD

Oj0 said:
I don't know you, did you ever work with Neo? Long time friend of mine :)
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I know Neo but I've never actually met him. Glimpsed him a couple of times at rAge last year. I ask him about the things I don't know! :-P
 
NAG - Wesley said:
I know Neo but I've never actually met him. Glimpsed him a couple of times at rAge last year. I ask him about the things I don't know! :-P
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His knowledge is quite uncanny. I was once talking to him about... It may have been clock skews? It was something we all know how to set for overclocking but don't actually know what it does (either that or something DirectX/D3D/CTM/OpenGL related) and he explained it to me in a way that made me feel I should've taken up engineering cause I had no idea what he any of the acronyms meant :o Anyway, I told him I know more about quantum physics than what he was telling me - bad move. Turns out so does he :D He's a great guy, we spend more time talking about politics, current affairs, health and fitness, etc than about overclocking. Weird considering overclocking is the reason most people want to talk to him :p

Sucks now that he's in ROC, my nights were normally spent on Gtalk with him until about 2am while he was rapping up a review at the NAG offices but the time zone difference now makes it impossible...
 
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ponder said:
Make & model?
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Acer Aspire 5542g. My plan is to get either a Liteon 256gb, Kingston 120gb V300 or a Samsung TLC 120gb Evo. I know the Evo and Kingston are quite old.

Long term plan is to also get ssd's in my server running linux and 8gb ram, one in my windows 7 netbook with 2gb ram. I know with linux you can adjust swapiness.
 
Ouch, that's Turion II-era hardware. Serviceable, but probably not snappy by modern standards. 8GB RAM is probably doable, but you need to test with some modules first to make sure it does.

The Liteon drives are fine, really not bad at all for the price they go for on Carbonite. Crucial's MX100 and M500 250/256GB also regularly goes on sale under R1500, if you want a full warranty with your drive.
 
Would a Seagate SSHD prove to be more practical on entry level hardware?
 
Roger Moore said:
Would a Seagate SSHD prove to be more practical on entry level hardware?
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You don't see the speed difference that the 8GB cache gives you too often unless you only boot into the OS and do the exact same things every single time. Seagate needs to bundle 32GB caches with their drives before the performance gets to a point and mostly stays there. All that these drives are good for is improving boot times and offering more storage space. That's about it.
 
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