During the past half year or so I have seen more and more people getting SSD drives for their computers as the prices are on a steady decline. But I have not seen any useful information about how these drives address the durability issues that are involved with flash based storage media.
I don't doubt that SSD storage media is useful as a storage device but I have my doubts about using it as a system drive (unless the operating system is an "embedded" system where it loads itself into RAM during startup so as to minimize read/writes to the drive).
The biggest issue of installing Windows on such a drive is the page file which is virtually impossible to disable (yes you can set it to 0 but it comes back on once the system runs out of physical memory which always happens eventually). I believe that a page file can wear out a flash drive with in months of frequent use.
I know that Windows 7 has introduced something that is called trimming which means (if I understand correctly) that the read/write access is randomized so as to even out the read/write wear on all sectors of the drive. But how does that really add to the durability of the flash drive? And what if I want to stick with XP/XP-x64 that from what I know does not support trimming?
I don't doubt that SSD storage media is useful as a storage device but I have my doubts about using it as a system drive (unless the operating system is an "embedded" system where it loads itself into RAM during startup so as to minimize read/writes to the drive).
The biggest issue of installing Windows on such a drive is the page file which is virtually impossible to disable (yes you can set it to 0 but it comes back on once the system runs out of physical memory which always happens eventually). I believe that a page file can wear out a flash drive with in months of frequent use.
I know that Windows 7 has introduced something that is called trimming which means (if I understand correctly) that the read/write access is randomized so as to even out the read/write wear on all sectors of the drive. But how does that really add to the durability of the flash drive? And what if I want to stick with XP/XP-x64 that from what I know does not support trimming?