Intel X25m 80GB SSD, DISABLE PAGEFILE?

[idata]

After reading on the web about ssd wear overtime I came across several websites claiming that people should disable pagefile as it wears the ssd out quicker. I also found a microsoft blog about win 7 and ssd's saying its fine to leave the pagefile on the ssd. So my question is I have 8GB ram should I disable the pagefile in windows 7 or not? And does the pagefile really wear down the drive as people claim. Thanks

[idata · Accepted solution]

As far as I'm concerned, the OS is designed and tested to use a pagefile and I'm not about to substitute my judgement for that of the designers. The SSD is designed to be written many more times than I will write to it before I throw it away. So, I'm not worried in the least by having my SSD hold the pagefile, and other other things people are disabling, like Windows Search's index.

[SKlin]

Short answer, NO. Set your page file to a custom min/max (both the same value) slightly higher than your ram (@8200mb) and leave it go. Advice I have been given is the ssds were designed for pagefile access, the set pagefile writes less and a fixed pagefile slightly higher than your ram will catch a memory dump for analysis if something goes wrong. I did that and so far so good.

[idata]

Well, I've got 12 gigs of ram on my machine and I don't really want to use 12 gigs of space on my ssd. I don't mind putting the pagefile on the ssd.

I don't really care much about a memory dump when things go wrong. I just want the most stable/fastest performance. What is the minimum pagefile I can use on a win7 64bit system with 12gig of memory to still have everything work properly. Right now I have it set at a 1 gig page file.

Is there any other reason to need a page file slightly larger than the memory in the system other than a memory dump during a crash... If I started crashing regularly, I could always reset the page file bigger..

Thanks for any advice.

[idata]

I don't expect you'll have any reliabililty issues with a 1 GB pagefile. A couple of issues would be:

1. Windows can "only" allow 13 GB of memory to be committed on your system. It may be that you run apps that can use the full 12 GB of RAM you have, but they try to commit more than 13 GB - in that case Windows would have to reserve RAM to meet committments, but committed memory isn't necessarily being used by the apps. It just has to be there because Windows said it would be there.
2. You run a long-lived, memory leaking app. As memory fills up Windows can page our that memory the app has leaked - the app won't be touching those pages anymore, so they don't need to be in memory. Windows can't discard them, because they still belong to the app, but it can page them out and reuse that memory. Obviously, this would only delay a reboot, but it could be the difference between 2 weeks and 4 four weeks.

I doubt if either of these would be a real problem for you.

Also, if your system does crash and you want to save full dumps, you can create another boot profile that limits Windows' memory using bcdedit (or maybe a GUI tool you can find). Then your pagefile would need to be larger than the limited memory.