SSD pagefile - safe?

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MarkTsen

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Nov 16, 2013
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Greetings.
I was looking for such a simple answer, but all I found was much more elaborated and did not exactly answer this question.

The Samsung 840 EVO 120GB is being shipped to me.

I only have 2 GB of RAM in my laptop, obviously I need a pagefile, but is it going to be safe for SSD or could it increase weariness or cause any unwanted effects on it?

Note, I'm not talking about memory leaks suddenly increasing the size of pagefile, that's a different thing and let's skip it.

Let your answers be based on your true experience, thank you.
 
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fil1p
Hey,

When I first got my SSD (Samsung 830) I too was worried, I ended up reading a lot on this subject and in the end I did several things. First of all Samsung includes software to help you optimize your SSD (ie. Disabling functions that could shorten its lifespan). Overall I ran most optimizations, however I left the pagefile on the SSD for a couple of reasons. First of all the reason I bought he SSD in the first place was to speed up my system. By keeping the pagefile on my hard drive I would not get some of the added performance benefits of an SSD. Second of all SSDs are well designed, and I have been running mine with a page file for close to a year and its been fine (I have ~2TB of writes on it). It still runs great, and I no...
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MarkTsen

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Nov 16, 2013
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Getting more RAM is not an option.
Besides, it would reduce the flash lifespan dramatically how? By 50%? By 5 years? You know, that would still leave it with 5 years which satisfies me.
Also, does flash wear faster than hdd platters?
 
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Danzas4321

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Jul 4, 2013
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Flash is much faster but only rated for a certain number of writes, and then they will die. that is why if you use a pagefile you will be constantly reading and writing data to the SSd, hence why the lifespan will decrease. a Hard disk drive will last you much longer ( some last up to 6 years or maybe even more!) but are much slower than a SSD. i would highly reccommend if you got even 2gb more of RA mfor your laptop to get upto 4gb.
 
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MarkTsen

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Nov 16, 2013
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I mentioned already that adding to the RAM is not an option and when I asked for any more precise information you gave me none. While I appreciate your time and effort I would like somebody to tell me if the drive would live like that 2, 4, 6 years or what. I'm absolutely clueless about SSD flash endurance.

I can tell that I'm not going to use any video editing or rendering. Just programming and gaming.
The current pagefile on my HDD has fixed size of 3GB and it only uses it every now and then.
 
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fil1p

fil1p

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Nov 29, 2010
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Hey,

When I first got my SSD (Samsung 830) I too was worried, I ended up reading a lot on this subject and in the end I did several things. First of all Samsung includes software to help you optimize your SSD (ie. Disabling functions that could shorten its lifespan). Overall I ran most optimizations, however I left the pagefile on the SSD for a couple of reasons. First of all the reason I bought he SSD in the first place was to speed up my system. By keeping the pagefile on my hard drive I would not get some of the added performance benefits of an SSD. Second of all SSDs are well designed, and I have been running mine with a page file for close to a year and its been fine (I have ~2TB of writes on it). It still runs great, and I no longer worry about it too much. SSDs are designed to endure such things, and while it may shorten its lifespan I wouldn't lose sleep over it (at least not anymore :p)

Also while I cannot find the link to this right now, I saw a thread on another forum where they wrote several hundred TB on a Samsung SSD, and it still worked! They where essentially performing a torture test on the drive, and it still ran.

So overall I wouldn't worry about it, if possible I would recommend to increase your RAM, and if you are really worried you could just keep your Pagefile on the hard drive (although that would slow things down).


Sorry for the long post, hope this helps!
 
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fil1p

fil1p

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Also here is a link to some torture tests that were done on a Samsung 840 250GB SSD, it survived over 700TB of data writes. Of course the 120GB version will arguably not last that long, but still it should be fine. Say the 120GB lasts half as long, thats still ~350TB, which would theoretically last over 10 years. Now of course there is a chance that it may fail earlier, but if it works as it should then it should last for quite a while.


http://us.hardware.info/reviews/4178/10/hardwareinfo-tests-lifespan-of-samsung-ssd-840-250gb-tlc-ssd-updated-with-final-conclusion-final-update-20-6-2013
 
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MarkTsen

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Nov 16, 2013
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Thank you fil1p!

That's the kind of answer I was expecting, based on experience and research.
I too want to boost the overall performance of my lappy but putting OS, common apps and the pagefile on the SSD that has up to 98000 IOPS on random read.

Thanks for assurance and the information about the endurance tests on the samsung SSDs, although there was no link I'm going to look it up, thanks very much.

EDIT: I see you fixed the link, thanks :)
 
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