Page File

[timothy2180]

How big of a difference will putting my page file onto an SSD make as opposed to a 7200 RPM HDD?



How big of a difference will putting my video games and OS onto an SSD make as opposed to a 7200 RPM HDD?



If the initial opening of an application is the only time the speed of the drive it is installed onto comes into play, I'm considering buying a small SSD(like 16GB) and just using it for a page file.


Thoughts?


Also, I thought SSDs had terrible write times. Is this incorrect? If not, wouldn't that make it terrible for a Page File?


Thanks

 

[WyomingKnott]

There are many different opinions on this. Some members swear by disabling the page file and just using enough memory. Others run the OS off the SSD and enable the page file there.

SSDs once had terrible write timesm as you said. Now, it depends on the model. Some are optimized for sequential read or random read, some for sequential write or random write.

Before putting in an SSD for a page file, you should A) ensure that you are actually paging, and B) consider adding more memory, instead, to eliminate that paging. If you go back through this forum, more experience people than I have posted how to check your memory usage. I think it's in Windows Task Manager, but find a more definite post.

This is an original idea, and sounds reasonable on the face of it, but there must be a reason why no-one is using this configuration.

Yes, putting the OS on an SSD has the primary advantage of speeding up boot and application loads.

 

[groberts101]

yeah... what he said. lol

If you've got 6 gigs or more, just set it to 1024 static size and let er fly. The chance of consuming much on consistent basis is very minimal unless you run tons of large Adobe apps, edit vids, or other ram hungry apps.

The other thing to consider is that the minimalistic usage of the page file(given sufficiant ram) would hardly wear out your SSD before you would be looking for an upgrade years from now.

Seeing as even the first gen users haven't shown drives with nand burnout issues,.. it seems to be over-dramatized quite often. I simply.. "buy em.. burn em.. upgrade em".

 

[sminlal]

Apparently the pagefile has 40 X more reads than writes (according to this), so the write penalty for putting the pagefile on an SSD is not as great as you'd think.

Nonetheless, I agree with WyomingKnott in that you're a lot better off spending your money on more RAM than on an SSD to hold the pagefile.

 

[timothy2180]

Ok, so it is pointless to buy an SSD dedicated to a page file. Thank you for the answers.

On to my other question about applications and OS, will an SSD improve how quickly the explorer process works? Or is it just how fast the OS boots? Don't get me wrong, a very quick boot is nice, but if that's all it does, fast OS boot time, fast application open time, then I don't care as much for it.

I want applications to also run more quickly once opened, as well as my OS running more quickly after booted. Will an SSD do this?

 

[groberts101]

let me make it easy to understand what SSD does to the users experience.


I have NEVER seen someone come from HDD and use SSD for a little while and say.. "I went back to HDD because it didn't really do much for me". There's a reason for that.


The harder you use the system the greater the gain. Try opening photoshop and 5 other programs as quickly as possible on HDD, then compare it to SSD. Loading apps, updates, and just about any other intensive operation is like night and day between the two. The perceived latency reduction is just what you see on the surface.

 

[sminlal]

Explorer caches a bunch of stuff in your profile, so if you have the profile folder on the SSD then yes, Explorer could run faster to display cached stuff such as file thumbnails. But it won't speed up transfers to or from disks other than the SSD.

 

[timothy2180]

Thank you. That answers all my questions.