topic Swap file or not in Win 7 w/SSD? in Archive

Swap file or not in Win 7 w/SSD?

idata — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 07:51:51 GMT

I've got an HP DM3-1030US notebook running Win 7 (64 bit), now with an X25-M 120GB drive as the hard drive. I've disabled Prefetch and disk defrag, and got rid of the swap file. With 4GB of RAM, should I re-enable the swap file?

Re: Swap file or not in Win 7 w/SSD?

idata — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 08:33:42 GMT

If you look at the settings when it was at default, you probably would have seen (if you have 4GB RAM) that recommended was 6GB, currently allocated was 2-3GB. When Windows is left to manage it automatically, it will dynamically change it if required.

For the sake of not breaking Windows, I'd leave it to manage the swap file itself, IMO. If you are worried about 2-3GB, then sure, disable it and see how you go. If you are worried about the pagefile writing to the SSD, don't be. Heck, monitor your reported writes over a week or so with the pagefile on and you'll see it's a non-issue. At least, that's what I found.

Re: Swap file or not in Win 7 w/SSD?

idata — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:55:52 GMT

Here are Microsoft's thoughts on the matter: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx 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.

Have you notice any application crashes? If no application is reporting running out of memory or crashing due to explicitly expecting a paging file, you should be okay without a paging file. Personally, I have a 1GB swap file on my SSD and I do see it get used even though I have 6GB.