Samsung EVO850 (2016) Pagefile myth (leave of turn off ?)

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dsr07mm

dsr07mm

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So I had for past 6 months pagefile turned off, since I bought 16 gigs of ram. I also moved Chrome cache and temp files on sata3 so I reduce writte/read from SSD.

Lately in couple AAA games I get crash about low virtual memory, so I know that pagefile is a problem. My question is, does pagefile still "reduce lifetime" of an SSD that much ? I left it under System Manage right now but not sure should I increase or reduce, playing The Division now, 7.5gigs ram usage and 9gb is pagefile size. A bit weird ?

So should I leave it or what ?

It's 10 years warranty but it's bought from company outside of my country, it's gonna take forever for warranty and I would like to have it for another 2-3 years luckily..
 
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Honestly, don't worry about it. People get so freaked out about SSD wear and while it is technically possible for it to become an issue, and there are (very occasional) workloads where it will almost certainly become an issue, the vast, vast majority of users don't get anywhere near wearing their drive within its useful life.

I have a very similar set up to you. 250GB 850 Evo, 16GB RAM, system managed page file. I can't remember exactly when I got the drive, maybe 18 months ago, but SMART data tells me it's been powered on for 2400 hours (or the equivalent of 100 24 hr days), and my wear levelling count has dropped from 100 to (wait for it...) 99. That's an estimated percentage of how much life the NAND has left. It's usually a...
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rhysiam

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Honestly, don't worry about it. People get so freaked out about SSD wear and while it is technically possible for it to become an issue, and there are (very occasional) workloads where it will almost certainly become an issue, the vast, vast majority of users don't get anywhere near wearing their drive within its useful life.

I have a very similar set up to you. 250GB 850 Evo, 16GB RAM, system managed page file. I can't remember exactly when I got the drive, maybe 18 months ago, but SMART data tells me it's been powered on for 2400 hours (or the equivalent of 100 24 hr days), and my wear levelling count has dropped from 100 to (wait for it...) 99. That's an estimated percentage of how much life the NAND has left. It's usually a fairly conservative estimate too. So the drive estimates that I've blown through a whopping 1% of my write cycles in ~18 months.

If you really want to be concerned, by all means monitor your SMART data (HD Tune, or Samsung Magician). Watch the "Wear Leveling Count" over time to see if it drops dramatically. If you see it dropping by significant percentage points over time, you can estimate how long before it hits 0... and you've reached your rated cycles. But it almost certainly won't budge at all.
 
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dsr07mm

dsr07mm

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My wear leveling count is on 99% aswel.

xGChf4y.png


And that was without pagefile. Just afraid of "numbers", when I run game which use 7gb ram and I see pagefile of 10gb I'm like..hmm not sure do I wanna play long :D
 
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rhysiam

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I'm not sure what you're worried about? You've got 99% of the rated life left on that drive (ratings are conservative, it'll probably run happily well beyond those ratings). Run it with the pagefile on for a while and see if it drops. Worst case (and totally not going to happen, but let's entertain the idea for a second), it drops a few % in a short space of time. Then turn it off again and all you've lost is a couple of % wear.
 
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dsr07mm

dsr07mm

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Well I guess that's only thing which I can do :) Thanks though :) I guess I will just keep system manage and ignore that for quite some time, around New Year if I remember again I will check that. Not sure if MSI Afterburner or any other OSD software show 10gb pagefile size, how much pagefile actually do writting on SSD.

Just paranoic a bit but I guess for no reason. I will leave it as it's now. Thanks !
 
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rhysiam

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Those 850EVOs are phenomenally popular and have an excellent reputation for reliability. Probably 99% of them are running in systems with the default page file... honestly, just don't worry about it.

The only reason I was encouraging you to check your SMART data was because you seem to be worried. If you don't want to trust some random person on the forums, that's fine. But do trust that "Wear Level Count"... it's the percentage of your drive's rated writes left. Run it for a while, you'll see that it has very, very little if any impact on your drive life... that way you can stop worrying because the drive itself is tell you it's running perfectly happily with loads of write cycles left.
 
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rhysiam

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Well if I continue to burn through my 850EVO's write cycles at my current rate (with pagefile on), I'm looking at it wearing out in somewhere between 50 and 150 years from now. So yeah, fair to say I can probably get something better! :)
 
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rhysiam

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I said "very occasional" workloads. There are things like write-intensive databases in server environments. A high volume email server, for example, might spend a lot of its time writing to the disk subsystem. You also wouldn't put a standard consumer SSD in a security system that records say 4-8 HD video streams 24/7. Maybe even a home media server that records multiple streams of HD TV for many, many hours a day *might* expose the write limits of an SSD (though I don't actually think even that would be an issue). They're very specific and very usual workloads. You would almost certainly know if you were doing something like that.

RE Wear Leveling Count, as I've said since my first post, is NOT logarithmic. It's actually very simple. It's the percentage of your drive's write cycles that you've used. Your drive knows how many write/erase cycles each cell is rated for (Samsung don't actually publish it but Anandtech estimated 2000 write cycles for the V-NAND in the 850 EVO). Wear levelling algorithms in the drive spread out writes such that your NAND is worn evenly. The drive knows how much has been written and tracks it, dropping the WLC value accordingly as write cycles are consumed. It is entirely linear.

To triple check, I looked into this before posting. It turns out the way Samsung handle it on the 850 EVO is that it starts at 99, "Current Value" is the percentage remaining (starting at 99) and the "Raw Data" value specifies your actual write cycles (of which you have ~2000).
Source: http://www.anandtech.com/show/8747/samsung-ssd-850-evo-review/4

So neither you nor I have actually even used 1% of our drive's rated write cycles yet.
I have used 12 write cycles (of ~2000 - with pagefile on).
According to your screenshot you have used 15 write cycles (of ~2000).

This is a storm in a teacup.
 
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mjslakeridge

mjslakeridge

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OK, thank you for the information. (BTW, I am not the OP). I haven't gotten a SSD yet, although I am looking into it. I do have a HDHomerun TV tuner connected to my computer and have it on for much of the day and I notice it writes a temporary file to my HDD and then erases or writes over it once the current program is over. I may be able to specify that the temp file gets written to a different drive once I get the SSD, will have to do some research.

Thanks again, didn't mean to hijack the OP's thread.
 
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rhysiam

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Right... thanks. Yes got you mixed up. Your question was relevant to the thread, I don't see it as hijacking.

That constant write scenario is one that's better suited to a mechanical HDD. But with one stream I honestly think an SSD would cope fine. Do the maths. Look at the bitrate of the stream and work out how long it would take to reach the rated writes on an SSD model you're looking at. In Australia, for example, HDTV streams max out around 15mbps, which equates to 81GB for every 12 hours of recording. That's right on the endurance rating (based on 5 year life) of the 500 & 1TB 850EVO. So you could record 12hr per day, 365 days a year for 5 years and still be within rated life. That's not the case for the smaller drives, or cheaper drives for that matter. But most drives will run well beyond rated write cycles... so yeah. You should absolutely be fine with a large decent quality drive. Cheaper drives would probably be okay... but no guarantees.
 
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mjslakeridge

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I just did the math on one of my recorded HD Television programs. A 3 hour and 3 minute program (NFL Football Game) is 20,390,084,608 Bytes. So dividing that by 10,890 seconds equals 1,857,020 B/sec, or 14,856,163 b/sec. So it looks pretty comparable to the 15mbps you have there in Australia. I also noticed while digging around this morning that the temp file that is created when just watching TV appears to be on my 2TB HDD (D: drive), so that must have been a setting in Windows Media Center when I first set that up.
 
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