Steve: And Mark Thompson and I have discussed this at length. He's performed the experiment of using an SSD for a swap file and watching it burn out the SSD. I mean, in a relatively short time it just killed it. And so, anyway, so my advice stands, which is, if you're using an SSD, hopefully before you have gone to the expense of using an SSD, which is still much more expensive than a hard drive, you will have invested money in as much RAM as your system can handle because RAM is much less expensive, and you'll get much more, you'll get huge benefit from going to the most RAM you can possible get. And if you've done that, then turn off pagefiles. And if the only drive you have is an SSD, I stand by my advice.
I agree that, from a performance standpoint, the SSD is a perfect device for containing the pagefile. Unfortunately, Microsoft thrashes their pagefile. I mean, they're writing to it a lot. Yes, 40 times less than they're reading, but it's something that's going on all the time, pretty much. I mean, we've all seen, we've watched the hard drive light flickering there, like when nothing is going on. It's like, what is it doing? Well, who knows. But we know that it's writing to the pagefile, which it does a lot. So anyway, I think it's a perfect example of two different people with very different aspects of the problem that they're addressing. I'm looking at long-term life. Microsoft's looking at performance.
