Pagefile and SSD

Re:Pagefile and SSD (candle_86)

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 07:36:07 GMT

my page file resides on my raid not my SSD, and i have a 20gb page file just so i never have to worry lol.

Re:Pagefile and SSD (James_L)

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 09:14:16 GMT

That is a perfectly good idea provided that it is necessary. The startup and shutdown times for SSD's are already quick. Mine happens to be a little under 24 seconds from POST to desktop. BIOS slows things down a bit but I am using a machine which is older technology (at least for the motherboard) and has a slower BIOS read for hardware.

Personally I dislike hibernating machines as it is not entirely necessary for my purposes.

Re:Pagefile and SSD (pagelm)

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 07:50:33 GMT

hiberfil.sys defaults to 75% of system RAM. It can be set as high as 100% (setting it over 100% brings it back to 100% automatically). I believe the minimum (if the file exists at all) is 50%.

If you'll never hibernate, go ahead and turn it off. But it makes boot- up even more lickity-split fast, even on an SSD. 2-16 gigs of capacity is hardly going to kill your modern SSD, and it only gets written at system shutdown (if you hibernate) and startup (if you just restored from hibernate). But if you have something for which you'd prefer that capacity for, by all means turn it off.

The resizing command is
PowerCfg.exe /HIBERNATE /SIZE percentage (don't put a % sign)

Re:Pagefile and SSD (Wily_One)

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 12:02:54 GMT

Thanks David. That looks like the very same MS posting I saw.

Re:Pagefile and SSD (david12857)

Sun, 05 Feb 2012 07:20:29 GMT

I have 12GB of RAM and the pagefile's Initial and Maximum size (MB) set to 1024. Windows defaulted to a lot more and I didn't see a reason for so much or any benefit to letting Windows automatically manage it. I'm looking at the Virtual Memory page now and it says Minimum allowed: 16 MB and Recommended: 18429 MB. Talk about going from one extreme to the other. lol

I moved my Documents and Desktop to my HHD but most games are staying on the SSD with the pagefile. What's the point of purchasing a SSD if we're not going to use it. I would only recommend disabling the pagefile if you need space. I remember reading this after I purchased my first SSD and asked for advice.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?
Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.
In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.
In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

This is sort of off topic but you can use http://windirstat.info/ to determine what's taking up space. I found hiberfile.sys was stealing 9.0GB after a new install of Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 (64-bit). I needed to use an elevated command prompt and the "powercfg –h off" command to delete it.

Re:Pagefile and SSD (James_L)

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 21:56:07 GMT

Just a word of note here for this subject: Windows, when it perceives it needs additional resources, will automatically create a temporary page file regardless if you have it disabled. It's just a legacy for the processes for when you alt-tab to another application so that the background tasks can still swap if necessary.

Personally for my SSD I have a 2gb fixed pagefile set on that drive. Mainly the swap space doesn't write all that much often enough to cause any performance or life degradation on the SSD for the small amounts it does for that. Since the size is fixed so be a small pagefile windows won't need to create one if the need arises.

Just food for thought.

Re:Pagefile and SSD (Wily_One)

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 21:13:44 GMT

Thanks Xander, that's along the lines of what the MS tech said as well, about the nature of pagefile read/writes. (I'd have to search for the link again...)

And yes WEI scores the drive as an SSD (7.3).

Thanks all. I'll leave the pagefile on the SSD, but I think I will make it a static size.

Re:Pagefile and SSD (xanderf)

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 20:44:35 GMT

I'd seen an Intel tech recommend some time back that the pagefile is just about the most perfect thing to put on an SSD. This was back before SSDs had really caught up with spinning platter drives on 'throughput'...they did seeks really well, but not big bursts of streaming data. So the fact that the system swapfile prefers lots of burst-y reads and writes and not so much large streams of data...made it an ideal match for SSD tech.

sotiri
As far as I know, besides some space saving tricks, the only things you absolutely must do is run Windows Experience Index so that Win7 recognizes its an SSD and set all your power profiles to never power off the drive so that background garbage collection and wear leveling can take place.

Doing this also disables defrag on the drive - also a good thing.

NEVER, NEVER, NEVER defrag an SSD. It lowers its lifespan and has literally no impact on its performance at all.

Re:Pagefile and SSD (sotiri)

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 20:07:29 GMT

SSD controllers and firmware have come a long way since they were first available mainstream. I don't think pagefile or any other "performance" tweaks are valid anymore, but old habits die hard and we, as enthusiasts, are determined to "tweak" anything we can, but I don't believe we need to worry about it anymore.

As far as I know, besides some space saving tricks, the only things you absolutely must do is run Windows Experience Index so that Win7 recognizes its an SSD and set all your power profiles to never power off the drive so that background garbage collection and wear leveling can take place.

Re:Pagefile and SSD (Zammy)

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:49:06 GMT

I set my page file manually to the amount of ram I have and always move it off the SSD. That's just how I do it and have never had any problems, I'm sure others will chime in with their solutions.

Pagefile and SSD (Wily_One)

Sat, 04 Feb 2012 15:49:24 GMT

Short story: Was running XP, lost a hard drive, got an SSD (120GB OCZ) and installed Win7. All good. HDD replacement finally came, so I'll be moving My Documents, reinstalling my games and whatnot to the HDD.

Now the age-old question: What to set for the pagefile, and whether to leave it on the boot drive (the SSD) or move it to the HDD? My concern is of course the longevity of the SSD and worry about paging causing excessive read/write cycles.

I've seen conflicting opinions on this topic. Some say absolutely get it off the SSD, others say it won't be a problem, including one post I saw from a Microsoft tech who said statistical analysis shows the pagefile in fact does not cause excessive read/writes. And then there's some that say no pagefile is needed at all, but I know Windows doesn't really like it when there is no pagefile for crash dumps and so forth.

I have 4GB of RAM, the current pagefile is dynamic ("let Windows manage") but seems to remain a constant 4GB.

Opinions?