What files should I move from my SSD to my Velociraptor ?

[Mfusick]

I am going to install a new 120gig Vertex 2 today. My second drive (old system drive) was a WD velociraptor.

Is there anything I should place on that velociraptor instead of the Vertex2 SSD?

I am looking for max performance over life span. I plan to replace the SSD before it likely would "wear out"

PC hardware never makes it to failure for me before I consider it obsolete and purchase a better replacement.

I heard some people move files and system files off the SSD... why do this? Is it a performace thing? Or just save reads and writes on the SSD?

 

[Emerald]

I would move my pagefile (swapfile) to the velociraptor

 

[sminlal]

If you've got plenty of RAM then the pagefile won't be heavily used and moving it to the hard drive won't really slow things down. On the other hand, under those circumstances leaving it on the SSD wouldn't be a big deal either.

I've placed my user profile on the SSD so that all of the temporary and cache files go there for good performance. But all of my documents, photos, and other personal files are on an HDD (because they're not performance-critical). My Intel X25-M G2 SSD sees about 5GB of writes per day, and with Intel's claim of "at least" 5 years of life at a write rate of 20GB/day that means my drive should last as much as 20 years. It'll be obsolete long before then.

 

[Mfusick]

Yeah... I was thinking the same thing. I won't possibly use this drive up.. or wear it out before I get the itch to replace it with much better hardware in the future.

So my question is.. Anything gained from moving a pagefile to a HDD ?

I have 4 gigs of ram..


Is this for a performance boost? Or to extend the life ???

 

[geofelt]

The page file would be the last thing I moved off of the SSD. A SSD is very fast for small random files, exactly the characteristics of a page file. You want page faults to be resolved as quickly as possible, because your app will wait for it.

True, If you have sufficient ram, the page file will not be very active. If true, it does not have to be very big either.

If you get lots of activity on the SSD, well, that is why you pay a premium for it. Just make certain that you have "trim" enabled.

 

[sminlal]

So my question is.. Anything gained from moving a pagefile to a HDD ?

You know the best thing to do is to simply try it for yourself. It's easy to change it's location - try it in both places and see if you notice a difference. If you don't, leave it on the HDD so that you won't have to worry about it using up write cycles on the SSD.

Unless you're doing some pretty heavy stuff in that 4GB of RAM I predict you won't see a noticeable difference. But the only way to know for sure is to try it.

 

[Mfusick]

you might though want to reduce the pagefile size to 1gb or so to save the precious space on sdd.

I bought the 120gig so I would not worry too much about this.... it pretty much would be for a few games and the OS only...

 

[Junk E-mail]

according to data compiles by microsoft, in a pagefile, the 80% accesses are reads.
less than 8% were writes.
of the 8% writes, about 85% were of 4kb or less. (posted somewhere on toms)

since writes on a ssd wear it instead of reads, i guess putting pagefile on ssd is no harm. also, 4kb reads is what ssd typically excel in over hdd.

you might though want to reduce the pagefile size to 1gb or so to save the precious space on sdd.

Since literally every number in that was wrong and I read the topic mentioned just a few minutes ago, I thought I'd correct & link:

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

* Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
* Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
* Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

From: http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/page-264367_14_50.html

 

[Mfusick]

I am relocating my documents/music/downloads onto my velociraptor but decided to leave the page file alone