Quote:
Originally Posted by ilovejedd
... some of the advice is just overkill. For example, moving the pagefile to a mechanical drive.
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This is what I would do ;-). With windows, even if you have enough memory, windows still writes to the pagefile - so just in case it might need more memory it would already have some data moved to the disk. Until you can precisely set your prefferences ...
At home I use Linux, so I would probably look for ways to optimise swap space use. With Linux YOU are the master of the system. It does what you tell it to do. With Windows it is often impossible set certain behaviour.
I would also consider placing swap file on an USB memory stick. I have seen memory sticks that claimed that they are optimised for such use. But I would have to test/investigate this before use.
I have also seen installation of Windows on a mil. spec. SSD that was set to "read only" by physical switch (a jumper) located on disk. It is *highly* non-trivial operation to make Windows run from a read-only disk and you have to make ramdisk overlay for certain directories and files so Windows "thinks" that it can write to files (otherwise it goes bonkers). User data is written only on demand on D:. This brings great benefits. You do not need to run antivirus, antispyware, antimalware, updates ..., users are not capable of screwing up anything. You just reboot machine and it works like new.
This would be much more easily done with Linux, because this is how many "Live" distributions work (*), and Linux is built to have only certain directories mounted read/write (such as /var or /etc or /home)
Quote:
Originally Posted by ilovejedd
There are folks who keep nothing but the OS on their SSD. No temp files, no programs, no games - just the OS. I wonder why they even buy SSDs. So they can boast about fast boot times?
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Again. This is almost what I would do ;-)
Place just OS and those few programs and those few sets of data that would benefit from being on a fast disk.
Data that do not affect critical performance can be on slower disk. But, an SSD disk is very expensive item for me. And those write numbers DO look scary for the price. (**)
Quote:
Originally Posted by ilovejedd
I did calculations on SSD endurance some time ago. On a 128GB 25nm SSD, you would need to write 375TB on it before you run out of write cycles.
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I have two observations:
1. You would need to install special program that would trap and record every single write to some log. I suspect that programs write to the disk more often than you think. Once I was tracing complicated problem with a Visual Foxpro application that was opening some tables. So I installed a special program that has recorded every single access to the disk to a log file. I was *astonished* how many files how many files get accessed before a complex application, such as Foxpro program even starts thinking about actually opening tables with data.
2. What you write is correct, in terms of math, but you would need to have a perfect wear-leveling mechanism, and by that time you would exhaust the last writeable byte ;-)
(*) see owerlay FS, for example here:
http://askubuntu.com/questions/10941...-use-overlayfs , Slax distribution uses something similar.
(**) my main desktop is still Pentium 4 with 2GB of RAM that I have purchased second-hand quite a few years ago. Until recently I have considered it to be great and powerful machine. Oh ... and many parts inside are scavenged from other systems.