Can i use a SSD drive for extra ram?

[mcbain942]

Im limited on my motherboard to 4gb of ram. But yet im running Windows Server 2008 R2. I also have SQL server running on it and i have to minimize how much ram it uses. Im still hurting for ram.

Now there are some things i can do, but i believe the best idea, would be to use a internal 32GB solid state drive and place my pagefile on that drive? or is there anyway i can get the solid state drive to be recognized as pure ram instead?

Anyone else have any recommendation? I heard Readyboost was really just for Windows kernal 6.0 and below. Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 r2 (Windows 7 server) are optimized to use Solid state drives.

Another options would be to use some pci card which i could add ram too. But here that was the old way of doing things.


Any suggestions? or should i go ahead with my plan and buy this SSD drive?

 

[jaguarskx]

You cannot use SSD as RAM.

Placing the pagefile on the SSD will slow down your PC since SSD is slower than a HDD.

 

[boonality]

I think that if your running SQL then 4GB of memory would be plenty. I mean we run 5000+ users on each of about 50 32bit Exchange servers with 15 databases in 3 storage groups on 4GB of memory in a production enterprise environment.

Now I would say that I'm hurting for more ram more than you and we get along fine.

 

[mcbain942]

You cannot use SSD as RAM.

Placing the pagefile on the SSD will slow down your PC since SSD is slower than a HDD.

how could u possibly state that a solid state drive is slower the a regular hard drive?

 

[bucket list]

SSD "write" operations are slow, "read" operations are faster than the writes -- suggest you compare the specs of the hard drive to the specs of the SSD since not all hard drives are created equal in read - write speeds.

 

[bouds]

You cannot use SSD as RAM.

Placing the pagefile on the SSD will slow down your PC since SSD is slower than a HDD.

That couldn't be further from the truth jaguarskx! Solid state drives are MUCH faster than hard disk drives. They are essentially RAM as opposed to spinning magnetic platters. The very reason SS drives are so desired, researched [for more efficient manufacture], and more costly is that they are exponentially faster! Sequential data can be stored sequentially [seems redundant but look at sequential seek times for HDD's verse non-sequential seek times] with far less time cost! Any address in memory can be reached at the same time as another regardless of the previous address requested. This is not true of hard disk drives because the pin has to move to the point on the platter which correlates to the address requested. Also there are no moving parts on a solid state drive which greatly increases their durability.

 

[sminlal]

You'll get a lot better performance with the pagefile on SSD than on an HDD because the SSD has access times that are about 100X faster than a hard drive. The HDD may have a faster write transfer rate, but when you tack 8-12ms on the front of that to wait for the drive to find the correct place to write the data to the SSD has long since left it in the dust.

And according to Microsoft, pagefiles get about 40X more reads than writes, so the write transfer rate has very little bearing on pagefile performance.

But here's the rub: if you really are in a position where your pagefile is being used, you're a lot better off with more RAM. So much so, in fact, that if the pagefile is a bottleneck I'd suggest replacing the motherboard with one that can accept more RAM. While an SSD is faster than a HDD, it's still tens of thousands times slower than RAM.

 

[bouds]

You'll get a lot better performance with the pagefile on SSD than on an HDD because the SSD has access times that are about 100X faster than a hard drive. The HDD may have a faster write transfer rate, but when you tack 8-12ms on the front of that to wait for the drive to find the correct place to write the data to the SSD has long since left it in the dust.

And according to Microsoft, pagefiles get about 40X more reads than writes, so the write transfer rate has very little bearing on pagefile performance.

But here's the rub: if you really are in a position where your pagefile is being used, you're a lot better off with more RAM. So much so, in fact, that if the pagefile is a bottleneck I'd suggest replacing the motherboard with one that can accept more RAM. While an SSD is faster than a HDD, it's still tens of thousands times slower than RAM.

All very good points. As a proof of concept, yes its possible to have an SSD as a SWAP partition to increase your page file, and yes it will be faster than using a HDD SWAP. sminlal is right though, you'd be much better off adding RAM instead.

As an aside, I've been thinking about turning a 50GB SSD into a SWAP because I have written a program that plots every point in an IFS [something similar to fractal flames]. With plots that have 10^7+ points its better to have very high resolution images. In this case however its not so much about speed, its about having the ability to work on a very large image without having to re-write a jpeg raster to utilize a K-B tree or some other means of using secondary memory for space.

 

[ProgrammingPhantom]

You cannot use SSD as RAM.

Placing the pagefile on the SSD will slow down your PC since SSD is slower than a HDD.

Are you out of your mind?
SSDs are much faster than HDDs! How can you be a mod? You don´t know anything about anything!

 

[sm620]

pretty sure this is an outdated thread, not sure why it came up first on google. look at the time stamps. Now SSD's are much faster in read and write. M.2 can be even faster. The only concern in using an SSD as RAM would be in the limited number of read/writes on an SSD, but that doesn't mean it couldn't work well as overflow ram for a long time.

I just wanted to respond since this comes up early on a google search. I was googling this topic because my concern is limited read/writes and I wanted to find out if that was still relevant, I'm pretty sure with some of the new technology and smarter SSD chips that is less of an issue as it used to be.