How to use my Samsung 960 Evo NVME drive

Jamin280672 · 26 May 2017 at 10:32

Hi, ive just brought a 250GB Samsung 960 Evo NVME drive and should be delivered today by DPD, cant wait to get it, however, I was reading some things up on it, and all its done is left me more confused, this is my first M.2 / nvme drive.

So my question basically is, I have a couple of spare SSD's (Samsung Evo 840s) 1 x 250gb and 1 x 120gb, should I use one these for page file, Chrome cache, temp files etc, and install windows, apps and games to the new 960 nvme, or doesnt it really matter, should I just leave everything to run off the nvme, would I notice a slow down putting the page file etc on a slower SSD ?

Or should I just sell the SSDs and make some of my money back.

My specs are, MSI x370 Gaming Pro Carbon mobo, RyZen R7 1700 @ 3.9ghz, 16gb G.Skill Trident Z RGB 3200mhz CL16 running at 3200mhz (F4-3200C16D-16GTZR) how sad am in knowing that off the top of my head

chroniclard · 26 May 2017 at 10:36

Probably dont really need a page file with 16gb ram.

OS, apps, some games on the M.2, keep the other SSD's for storage.

Jamin280672 · 26 May 2017 at 10:41

chroniclard said:
Probably dont really need a page file with 16gb ram.

OS, apps, some games on the M.2, keep the other SSD's for storage.

Thanks, I also have a 3tb external USB hard drive that I store all of my music, movies, drivers, downloads etc on, I set chrome up to download any files straight to that drive to a specific folder.

chroniclard · 26 May 2017 at 11:08

Would keep those SSD's for games too. Could quite easily fill a 250 main os/app drive.

ElB · 26 May 2017 at 13:47

chroniclard said:
Probably dont really need a page file with 16gb ram.

While this is technically true, do not disable it. If it's not needed Windows won't use it, but if you do end up needing it and it's not there it will be bad times...

Anyway, as for the original question, I've reserved my M.2 drive for Windows, a few essential programs, and anything that loads during startup so that in the event one of my other drives fails it's not going to give me any problems. I experimented with putting a couple of games on it but didn't notice much in the way of loading time reduction over having them on a SATA SSD -- small games loaded very quickly but reducing a five second load down to two seems a bit pointless, and larger games tend to do a lot of CPU business while they're loading so improving IO speeds doesn't really gain you much.

Generally speaking, while M.2 drives are theoretically a bazillion times quicker than SATA the perceived speed increase in general use is a lot less marked. Sure, Windows boots in about a second, and that's great, but after that there are a lot of other factors that come into play -- moving from mechanical drives to SSDs was huge, but moving from SATA to NVMe is much less dramatic. (It's kind of like the diminishing returns in console generations: going from Megadrive to PlayStation was huge, then PS1 to PS2 was awesome, PS2 to PS3 was pretty cool, but PS3 to PS4 is more evolutionary than revolutionary.)

chroniclard · 26 May 2017 at 14:06

Never had an issue without a pagefile, only thing you might get if you manage to use 16gb all at once(wont happen in gaming) is you get a low memory warning.

ElB · 26 May 2017 at 14:59

chroniclard said:
Never had an issue without a pagefile, only thing you might get if you manage to use 16gb all at once(wont happen in gaming) is you get a low memory warning.

Won't happen? Maybe not today, maybe not this year, but it'll happen. Even now the "recommended" 8GB for most games assumes you're running nothing else, but with OBS, CAM, and a few Chrome tabs open this is what 10 minutes of GTA V gets you:

I think it's a thing that started around Windows XP and has kind of persisted; XP's memory management was garbage, and yes, turning it off could improve things drastically, but that was a loooong time ago, and we've moved on. Now it makes no difference to performance (or at least not one that you'd notice -- in some cases it's a fraction of 1%), so disabling it gains you nothing but potentially causes problems (yes, you might just get an "out of memory" error, but you may also get bluescreens, lost files, and general mayhem).

chroniclard · 26 May 2017 at 15:24

Think you are exaggerating a bit.

ElB · 26 May 2017 at 15:31

Exaggerating? Which bit? The speculation that RAM requirements will increase (a pretty reasonable assumption), the guy's meticulous and exhaustive benchmarks that demonstrated no appreciable performance increase from disabling the pagefile (maybe if I get bored I'll try it myself), or the suggestion that you may suffer problems if you disable it and run low on RAM (again, reasonable; if a process requests more RAM and is denied it then there's a good chance it'll crash; if that process is writing to a file at the time then that file is toast, and if it's a critical process that falls over then it's going to take everything else with it and give you a lovely bluescreen)?

It's like wearing a seatbelt. I've never needed one and it's highly unlikely I ever will, but not wearing one doesn't gain me anything and it might lose me my life so why risk it?

ArmitageShanks · 26 May 2017 at 18:36

I haven't run with a pagefile on my laptops for over five years and neither on my gaming rig. If you have enough RAM for everything you're running, you don't need it as chroniclard correctly says. Unlike Unix, Windows ALWAYS flitters about with the pagefile (if you have one set up) regardless of whether you have 64GB or 4GB RAM - I prefer not to have my SSD write cycles wasted on that crap when I have plenty of spare RAM available that it should just be using instead.

If you start getting regular low memory warnings, it's time for an upgrade.

ElB · 26 May 2017 at 19:03

At the risk of this turning into a heated debate, sure, you don't need it, but your car doesn't need airbags or seatbelts or crumple zones or laminated glass, but you'd be an idiot to remove any of those things. They do you no harm, but if they're not there when you do need them you'll feel like a bit of a chump.

Windows will not page things to disk if it doesn't need to. It used to, back in the terrible old days of XP (which is when this whole "turn off your pagefile for performance boost because I am the leet haxxor!!111!one!!11" thing started), but back then running out of RAM was a very real thing on most low/mid-spec machines. Now, though, if it'll fit in RAM it'll almost certainly be in RAM. Having a pagefile does not decrease performance (read the benchmarking article linked in my earlier post), and will only use write cycles on your SSD if you run out of RAM, and all disabling the pagefile does is remove a safety net, so while you could probably go the rest of your life with it disabled and not suffer any ill effects there is no point in doing so whatsoever. You gain nothing, you might lose something -- it's not rocket science.

Run perfmon, click on Monitoring Tools > Performance Monitor, hit the green plus, and add Pagefile > %Usage, then look on as the line doesn't budge; it'll probably be somewhere between 3% and 5%, but that's really just reflecting its existence. Don't pay attention to the "paged/non-paged pool" figures in Task Manager -- they just tell you how much of your kernel virtual address space is guaranteed to reside in memory (non-paged) and how much can be swapped out (paged) and are not related to actual pagefile usage.

(I've got nothing to do this weekend so I may make a YouTube video about this -- there's apparently very little concrete information about it out there despite the fact that "everybody knows" turning it off is a good idea.)

bledd · 26 May 2017 at 20:34

ElB said:
While this is technically true, do not disable it. If it's not needed Windows won't use it, but if you do end up needing it and it's not there it will be bad times...

Yup, if you disable it, you'll have odd issues down the line.

Jamin280672 · 27 May 2017 at 15:34

what I did in the end was use the nvme for windows, programs and games, like you guys said, 250gb doesnt last long, ive only got 100gb left, but thankfully no slow down yet, I think i'll grab another in the near future and RAID them together.

Like you said 16gb is loads of ram, so I setup a 4gb ram disk with the MSI app, I put the page file on there, doesnt matter that it gets cleared each time the computer gets restarted as theres an option to do this in windows with page file anyway for security reasons.

I also put Chrome cache and Windows TEMP and TMP files on there, after all, they're only temp files.

http://imgur.com/kbFZ3l3

http://imgur.com/gPjxrHv

ElB · 27 May 2017 at 15:46

Jamin280672 said:
I setup a 4gb ram disk with the MSI app, I put the page file on there

/facepalm

David Bisset · 29 May 2017 at 11:08

Plenty issues caused by turning pagefile off even if you don't run out of RAM as many programs (especially older ones) rely on it's existence. Seen so many cases of people believing it's unnecessary and then seeking support cause they're having trouble, and turning it back on is an instant fix.

No idea why people keep advising to kill it, in some theoretical edge cases it helps performance but in so many more it does the opposite. SSDs have more than enough writes that it's not relevant from that perspective either - the only case worth looking at at all is when you've not enough space on SSD so have to push it elsewhere, especially a slow old spinny disk. If you can have it on SSD reasonably then just keep it.

HoneyBadger · 29 May 2017 at 13:48

ElB is spot on. Do NOT disable page file on windows, those who say do it do not fully understand the ramifications of doing it. Leave it on.

TheVoice · 29 May 2017 at 23:17

ArmitageShanks said:
Unlike Unix, Windows ALWAYS flitters about with the pagefile (if you have one set up) regardless of whether you have 64GB or 4GB RAM

Indeed, and you'd think people would see this as a rather obvious sign that a pagefile is required regardless of how much RAM you have.

ArmitageShanks · 31 May 2017 at 10:44

David Bisset said:
Plenty issues caused by turning pagefile off even if you don't run out of RAM as many programs (especially older ones) rely on it's existence. Seen so many cases of people believing it's unnecessary and then seeking support cause they're having trouble, and turning it back on is an instant fix.

Nonsense. Programs do not "rely on its existence", they rely on the available heap the OS provides. Programs do NOT have direct access to the pagefile. What people have problems with is running too many applications for the available physical memory. The OS uses the pagefile to alleviate this problem at the expense of performance (less so with SSDs obviously). Run out of pagefile space and you get exactly the same issues.