I have read numerous articles by searching on google..... some say that even if you have enough RAM and will probably never use a page file, it is best to set it to 1024 min / max or 2048 min / max just incase any ancient program keeps looking for a page file. I have never run across this situation but I used to keep my pagefile to 1024 min / max now that I have upgraded to an SSD, I read that putting a pagefile on an SSD is bad as it may degrade the life of the SSD due to constant reads/writes I am very confused now.......what shall I do? Disable the SSD since I have 16 GB of DDR3 RAM? Or set it to 1 GB on the SDD? or set it to 1 GB on my secondary 7200 RPM Seagate Momentus XT? or what do you think? There isn't one thread I read that has the same answer,,everyone keeps saying something different. And for the life of me I can't figure out why does Microsoft by default set the pagefile to the same size as your RAM...I mean it's pretty dumb to have 4 or 8 or even 16 GB of RAM + a 16 GB pagefile......like holy crap who would ever use that? Doesn't the RAM flush itself anyway when it's out of space? PS: I don't play any games, all I do is surf the net on firefox, period My system specs: ASUS G73Sw • Intel Core i7 2630QM @ 2.0/2.9 GHz. • 16 GB DDR3 1333 MHz. SDRAM • nVIDIA GeForce GTX 460M 1.5GB GDDR5 VRAM • 17.3" 16:9 HD+ (1600x900) Screen • Kingston KC100 120GB SSD + Seagate 500GB 7200RPM SSH • Windows 7 Home Premium (x64)
You can disable pagefile without a doubt. Windows will automatically create a virtual pagefil in RAM, when needed, so there goes the argument about programs seeking pagefile. I haven´t had a physical pagefile since I was able to put more then 2 GB of RAM into my old XP machine, and that must have been at least 5 or 6 years ago.
from your description i see 2 drives one SSD and one regular - set the page-file to 0 on the SSD and whatever you want on the regular drive the main reason for not putting a page-file on a SSD is they are a file that stays pretty much in one place on the drive and gets written to alot, thus potentially using us all the write cycles for that set of bits/bytes
After reading a myriad of articles on various sites/forums I ended up setting the Pagefile to 1024 min/max on the SSD C: Partition as my pagefile will rarely if ever be used
I agree, a pagefile on the SSD shouldn't be an issue with 16GB of RAM. With 8GB of RAM it depends on the system use, and anything less than 8GB it could be an issue with SSD lifespan. Its true that setting the min and max size of the pagefile makes sense, however in your case it doesn't! I'm not sure of the best lower limit with 16GB of RAM, 1GB should be more than enough! Set the upper limit to say 4096MB. The reason for this is the pagefile will only ever be 1024MB unless its needed to be bigger than that due to memory load, and that shouldn't be an issue! the upper limit of 4096MB is only there as a 'just in case' scenario. If it does grow beyond 1024MB it would be interesting to find the cause...
This is not %100 true. SSD changes sectors by itself. this is called trim. a ssd which has trim support tries to use disc sectors evenly. so one file doesn't always stay at the same sectors. But it will be better to use another disk for swap file with a low ram system. because windows will write swap file more frequently which is not good for a ssd.
I have 3 PC with SSD for 1.5 years (vertex 2) 2 SATA1 Intel P4 2 GB of RAM and a 50GB SSD => SWAP 2GB 1 Quad Core Intel SATA2 16GB of RAM and two SSD => SWAP 16GB - 120 GB primary partition - 50 GB SWAP and virtualbox By saving regularly in Excel statistics entries for each disk, the calculation gives a lifetime of about 160 years for Pentium .. using the SWAP massively and 250 years on my bomber for video editing. The short life of SSD is an urban legend. For information, all the temp files are also on the SSD, it is a real plaisr of Use. "My SSD is faster Than your HDD" sticker provided by OCZ and I add: "The lifetime of my SSD is higher than your HDD" Remember that the main advantage of SSD is in the writing of 4K files that match file handling of Windows swapfile! About 30 times faster than HDD
Obviously the trim is on, it means that windows never writes to the same part of the SSD. Windows writes on the best available block and waits idle periods to start TRIM (or the garbage collector, but I know only OCZ)
16 GB is too much indeed, I will reduce the size and disable hibernation (also 16GB ) The swap is only used when I open several vm and some applications