To Page File or Not To Page File?

Polygon

Polygon

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So, I'm hoping to get an SSD for Christmas for my HTPC. I'm actually pretty certain. Anyhow, solid state memory has a limited number of read/writes before they go belly up. I know that's a lot of read/writes.

However, would you move the page file to another drive or leave it on the SSD? The reason I want the SSD is to reduce noise, first and increase speed, second. If I move it to the other drive that's not going to change the noise. I'm also thinking that it will probably be at least three years before it's even an issue which isn't an issue to me. But my math could be off.

Tell me what your thoughts are, especially those of you running SSDs.
 
I've got my pagefile on my SSD. Windows is free to allocate space there, currently it has allocated 900MB and says about a third is in use. Apparently Windows likes to swap some stuff to disk even if there is plenty of available RAM.

Now, whether you should put it onto your SSD depends on how much swapping you expect to occur. If you expect lots of swapping, then you should put it onto your SSD to benefit from the massive speed boost compared to swapping to HDD. If you expect little swapping, then you should put it onto your SSD because there is even less reason to worry about wear :tease:
 
Polygon said:
would you move the page file to another drive or leave it on the SSD?
Click to expand...

Are you running Win 7? Microsoft have a post regarding these concerns:
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.
Click to expand...
I disabled the pagefile on my 120 GB SSD for space reasons, but let Windows manage one on a RAID 0 volume.
 
Ravenlord said:
I disabled the pagefile on my 120 GB SSD for space reasons, but let Windows manage one on a RAID 0 volume.
Click to expand...

I really recommend looking for the 500MB or so it takes to let Windows use it for most swap operations.
 
Space isn't a concern for me. I asked for a 60GB which should be more than enough for an HTPC. It looks like I was just being paranoid about the premature wear. Also being an HTPC it shouldn't be using the page file a lot anyhow.
 
Does an HTPC even need an SSD? To reduce noise you could consider one of those 5900rpm LP Barracudas or similar drives.
 
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You might think but I have two issues with using a magnetic drive. What's in there now is a 320GB Seagate. When loading Mediabrowser and it loads all the cached thumbnails it's takes a while and slows down browsing within Mediabrowser. Most people offload that to a USB drive, which I was going to do. However, while using it it accesses the drive randomly, most likely the page file. It's annoying when you're listening to anything that has soft sections as the drive is pretty loud in this case for some reason. Otherwise my HTPC is silent and I'd like to make it completely silent.
 
If you have >4GB of RAM, why even use a pagefile?

(I.E. My sandy bridge build will be using 8GB of DDR3. Why should I keep a page file?)
 
Some older applications look for a page file and won't work without one, even though they'll never actually use it.
 
Booster said:
Some older applications look for a page file and won't work without one, even though they'll never actually use it.
Click to expand...

I guess Windows is an older application, isn't it :p


Windows does not do well without a pagefile. It's like a toddler with a security blanket.
 
A small blanket pagefile will do though. I've allowed Windows to choose the size on its own between 256MB and 2048MB, and it's perfectly happy with 256MB. 237MB of that is used by the kernel, I assume it wants to have that paged by default.
 
JakeRadden said:
If you have >4GB of RAM, why even use a pagefile?

(I.E. My sandy bridge build will be using 8GB of DDR3. Why should I keep a page file?)
Click to expand...

So you're not SOL when a program/website springs a memory leak.

EDIT: Also, thinking you'll never use up 8 GB of RAM is like you ten years ago thinking you'd never fill up that 160 GB HDD. :p
 
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Hardware fix : put the fastest drive you can get on the C: and over allocate space rather than under. There is an algorythm which you should be able to find on the internet for sizing the page file. The defaults are OK but you can usually do better. RAM - get as much as you can in as big blocks (the same size) as is possible - always a good thing.
 
I follow the x 1.5 rule for swap size.
 
RAM Drive and put it there? Never tried it on > Windows 2000.
 
warden said:
RAM Drive and put it there? Never tried it on > Windows 2000.
Click to expand...

Oh good, so when it runs out of RAM, the computer can swap out to RAM!

I know there are a few cases where this actually makes sense (don't want a swapfile, but you have software that won't run without one), but still...
 
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