Where to put the swap/page file?

drakioned

drakioned

drakioned

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Hi,

I have the following 3 drives connected to my computer.
- 64gb Samsung SLC SSD (circa 2-3 years ago)
- 500gb / 16mb buffer/ 7200rpm Samsung drive (HD501LJ)
- 1TB / 8mb buffer / 5400rpm WD Caviar Green (WD10EAVS)

The OS is installed on the SSD, and the games are installed on the 7200rpm drive... now the swap file, would it be better off on the 7200rpm, because it's faster, or on the 5400rpm drive, on the basis that it's another drive, and it'd be better if I wasn't hitting the same disk for the games and the swap at the same time?

I have 8gb RAM and am running Win 7 x64.
 
drakioned said:
would it be better off on the 7200rpm, because it's faster, or on the 5400rpm drive, on the basis that it's another drive, and it'd be better if I wasn't hitting the same disk for the games and the swap at the same time?

I have 8gb RAM and am running Win 7 x64.
Click to expand...

I'd put it on the 500GB drive for the reasons you mentioned.
 
There's an MS blog entry here that's worth a read.

It contains the following information...

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.
Click to expand...

Assuming there's enough free space to allow the wear levelling algorithms to work a bit of accelerated wear is probably a reasonable trade-off. With a three year warranty the most a 60GB SSD is going to cost is £33/year.
 
Not putting the pagefile on the SSD kinda defeats the purpose of a SSD, I just left mine on my Vertex2 SSD.

Have you disabled Drive Indexing, Prefetch, Superfetch and Defragging on the SSD?
 
Put it on SSD.

With 8GB memory you will only use very small amount of page file, that's unless you start running out of memory then the page file really increases.

Windows 7 is better at managing memory then XP, and the page file is only really used when it needs to be.
 
The swap file should be on the drive with the OS for faster swapping. The OS will be a few milliseconds slower if it has to write or retrieve data on another drive, especially if the other drive is an HDD. If you have 4GB RAM or more you can reduce the swap file size to 512MB Min and 1024MB Max. Works fine for me.
 
Anand wrote an excellent article on this matter using a Vertex 3 Pro. If you write ~7GB a day it'll take a ridiculous amount of time for a 34nm SandForce drive to be worn down enough to be noticeable. Don't worry about it, by the time your current drive is dead, SSDs will be so cheap you won't mind.
 
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