Solid-State Drives (SSD)

[digby]

Hi, I'm building a new PC which will be Win7 (64bit with 16GB RAM). After much research I decided to go for a 256Gb Crucial M225 as my OS boot drive. (arrived today).  Now I did quite a bit of research on the use of a swapfile and I'm totally confused.

In the past when building nt/xp PC's and Win 2k servers I've always gone down the route of swapfile = 2x RAM on separate partition.

Now surfing the web about swapfile on Win7 I get 2 conficting views 1) if you've enough RAM you don't need one & 2) you MUST have one all the world will come to an end. Both these views have been expressed by so called "MS Experts"

Secondly regarding swapfile on a SSD again I've seen 2 conflicting views. 1) Keep the swapfile on the SSD & 2) Avoid putting the swapfile on an SSD because all the small writes will kill it, best to put the swap on a second IDE drive.

Thanks for any advice.

[targetbsp]

http://forum.crucial.com/t5/Solid-State-Drives-SSD/SSD-Tweaks-for-vista/m-p/4577#M621

The info there is based on the included links to actual Microsoft support suggestions and a blog by the Windows 7 team.  It does indeed seem to be a fiercely debated subject by MS Experts but I can't see how you can get a more official answer than from MS themselves.

[sfaure]

twice the ram is old news anyway, and the recommendation was all predicated on the idea that ram was expensive.  Today ram is relatively cheap and even at the incredible speeds of these ssds's if you start using your disk as "ram" your system performance is going to degrade rapidly.

Many *old* install programs, however, actually check for the pagefile size before allowing an install (oracle is one example that comes to mind).  Some of those you might actually have to fool the installers to get them to install (or at least not complain.

With 16Gigs of ram, id say its pretty unlikely you would need a pagefile.  That being said you might have to enable one for an old stupid installer program that checks for it.

Windows 7 runs very nice for me with 8 gigs of ram, and no way i'm going to setup 16 gigs of my ssd as a page file (the ssd space if far more valuable than the ram).  

All that being said, and w/ windows 7 pretty new there IS one funciton of a pagefile that you might want to be aware of.  If the page file is < 400M then the windows kernel would not have anywhere to write debug/log information if (or maybe its when <snicker>) it crashes.   Indeed that appears to be the only warning the advanced settings tab gives you when you try to set the pagefile size down.   I used this router.  allocated 400 megs for the pagefile (really kernel dump) and kept the rest for my data.

[targetbsp]

In Windows 7 they have dropped the page file size needed for that to 200mb.  So I'm running a 256mb PF on the SSD.  I needed one (of any size) for one of my games and figured I may as well choose the smallest geeky size big enough for Windows in the unlikely event it needs it.

[digby]

Thanks.

I plan to start this weekend.

[digby]

Drive up and running for a week with Win7 64bit and v.v.quick well pleased.

Using firmware 1571 (waiting for the 1819 fix)

Quick questions, for normal use how often is it advisable to run wiper to keep things in tip top condition?

Regards

[targetbsp]

On 1571 I never ran it in 2 months use.  To an extent it depends on your usage of the drive.  If you notice writes get slow - run it.  If you don't notice it there's not much point!