Paging file and SSD

tl266

Honorable
Jun 2, 2013
10
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10,510
Hi all, hope this is in the right place and not too common of a question, have searched around a bit but a lot of the topics I've found are fairly inconclusive.

Basically I've just got a new (refurbished) lenovo laptop with a 120gb ssd just for evening browsing after work. After some attempts to customise the virtual memory to assist the integrated graphics in some very light games I discovered a load of people saying that page files should never be written to SSD. Seeing as I only have an SSD and due to conflicting opinions where I've searched so far, I thought I would just check to see if it is indeed something to worry about?

Thanks in advance.
 

Deus Gladiorum

Distinguished
If I'm correct (and honestly, I'm not too sure I am -- someone please corroborate) I think pagefile is 'forbidden' on SSDs because of flash memory's lesser durability when it comes to write cycles compared to hard drives -- in other words, NAND cells can withstand less data being written to it than a hard drive can before it dies, and pagefiling is the process of constantly writing data to the storage device to supplement RAM.

However, flash memory durability is much less concerning these days than they were before. SSDs have become primary boot drives in recent years not only because their availability and GB/dollar have increased immensely, but because their durability has too. Maybe in the early days of SSDs and flash memory, people trying to use their USB sticks (which also use flash memory) as faster alternatives to their hard drives had to be wary of this, but these days it's seriously not a problem. Durability for SSDs is massive these days, and you'd have to be writing dozens of GB to it per day for at least a couple years on end before you start worrying about a dying NAND sector.

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tl;dr?

Don't worry about it.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator


Yes, for early consumer grade drives, that was a concern. Not so much now.
Change your 'dozens of GB to it per day' to hundreds per day.

See this for SSD endurance:
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
 

tl266

Honorable
Jun 2, 2013
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10,510
I've got 4gb of RAM with 3978 mb currently allocated for paging files (although I briefly put it up to 5000 to see if it made a difference for games). The laptop is a T420s so could have be 2-4 years old I guess. Don't know if this puts it in the sector of early consumer grade drives or not.
 

USAFRet

Titan
Moderator


2-4 years old. No, not really. My main drive is an almost 3 year old Kingston. Still running strong.
 

Neil_T

Reputable
Mar 12, 2015
3
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4,510
I have a range of machines running with SSD. Every Single One has failed when the swapfile has been on the drive and I've had to repair it with an offline chkdsk to mark the locked sectors as bad.

Let's be aware of the situation. SSD's have very intelligent caching algorithms but the swapfile is the one area which can overwhelm this.

MLC NAND (used in almost all consumer SSD drives), have a max write, erase, write cycle of 4,000. In the context of a swapfile that is nothing.

SLC NAND, on the other hand has a cycle of around 200,000. However the only place you will find SLC NAND, outside of hugely expensive business drives, is in SSHD hybrid drives.

I know for a fact that I'm unusual. Most of my machines, including laptops, run either 24 hours or extended hours. My machines are not 3/4/5/8 hours a day machines. As such, the extensive write to swapfile done by Windows kills my SSD's in around 18 months.

Since I moved the Swapfiles to other drives, the issue has, mainly, gone away. The exception is my OCZ 240 gig boot drive for my Alienware laptop which I have just replaced at 26 months.

Drive manufacturers now clearly state the average write cycle on their drives. My latest OCZ ARC Drive states 20gb unique write per day for a 5 year lifecycle.

My alternate option for my Netbook which only has one drive slot is this

http://www.ebuyer.com/602205-wd-black-dual-drive-1tb-hdd-120gb-ssd-wd1001x06xdtl

But it's still a bit pricey for what I want to pay, it's more than half the price of the original netbook. AS my netbook takes 8GB of RAM, I'm flirting with upgrading it to 8GB and putting in a smaller SSD then using a tiny RamDrive (circa 512mb) and place the swapfile on it. The RamDrive won't be for swapping when memory is exhausted but to stop Windows creating a temporary swapfile when you tell it not to. Which it does.

As I understand it the reality of a SSD is this. It writes to new areas until it has written to every location on the drive. Then it starts re-using erased cells on a least used basis. Simply put, if you use a small SSD for the C drive, dump a lot of non changing data on it (apps etc) and have high volatility write files (swawpfile), on it, you will hammer certain segments of the drive whilst leaving others almost pristine. This causes a failing drive where the majority of the drive is good but the segments in use are becoming blocked.

Some day, I guess, drives are going to have to become even more intelligent and move non changing data to the most used data locations to stop them from failing.

In the interim, people like me who have high write volumes on drives with large segments of non changing data will need to approach it in a more intelligent way.