2012-10-13, 20:20 | Link #1 |
Knight Errant
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Age: 35
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SSDs and space economy
So I've recently done a big upgrade of my computer, and as part of it, I bumped my RAM up to 16 GB, and in addition to my terabyte HDD I already have, I installed a Solid State Drive, and put my main OS on it. Given my SSD is only 128 GB, I'm keen to economise. I noticed after finishing my install that there was ~30 GB of space I hadn't accounted for. I eliminated 5GB of that by taking out system restore, and another 16GB by moving the pagefile(virtual memory) from the SSD to the older larger HDD. However, I still have 8GB of unnaccounted for space. So I have 2 main questions:
1. Where is the last 8GB of space being used by windows? (IE my system says it's using 8GB more then the space if I add all my folders) 2. Was moving the page file to the HDD a good idea? On the one hand, I have a lot of RAM, and space on the SSD is limited. On the other hand, the SSD is a lot faster to read/write, so if the page file did have to be used, it would probably be better on the SSD. |
2012-10-13, 20:38 | Link #2 |
Senior Member
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Philippines
Age: 47
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Hmmm... Given that you're now using a huge amount of memory, maybe you should look into reducing the page file size and location by right-clicking on My Computer and then Advanced System Settings.
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2012-10-14, 03:46 | Link #6 |
Asuki-tan Kairin ↓
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Fürth (GER)
Age: 43
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SSD hdds have similar write cycle limitations as more common solid state memory devices like e.g. USB memory sticks. If you want to maximize the lifetime of your SSD, you would want to avoid files like the pagefile or hyperfile on the SSD. Those are very heavy duty regarding wirte cycles.
Besides, if you really ever run into a memory shortage with 16GB of RAM chances are that it is because of a memory leak of some sorts. I have 16GB of RAM in my system and disabled the pagefile. After nearly a year I never had an out of memory problem that wasn't related to 32 bit applications breaking their own 2GB addressable memory limits.
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2012-10-14, 04:28 | Link #7 | |
Le fou, c'est moi
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Las Vegas, NV, USA
Age: 34
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Try disable the page file and continue using your PC without worrying about it.
If you don't have problems, then you don't have problems and you've got that extra free space to put whatever you want on your Samsung. If you do just turn it back on. That said, this is what Microsoft posted back in the very early days of SSD computing (2009): Quote:
This was back when TRIM was young, Windows 7 was new, and many SSD's wear leveling algorithms couldn't be compared to today. Microsoft and the SSD manufacturers are much better at this SSD thing by now. But of course having it on an HDD (so you can experience the classic slowness in Photoshop, yeah!) is different from not having the page file at all, which is a different kind of solution. |
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2012-10-14, 05:10 | Link #8 | |
Asuki-tan Kairin ↓
Join Date: Feb 2004
Location: Fürth (GER)
Age: 43
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Quote:
Many people still do not know that producers of hard and software estimate the normal expected lifetime for consumer products to be 2 or 3 years. In their views, any operation/practice that allows hardware to at least last 3 years is good.
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Last edited by Jinto; 2012-10-14 at 05:25. |
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2012-10-14, 05:57 | Link #9 | |
Le fou, c'est moi
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Las Vegas, NV, USA
Age: 34
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Quote:
However, "very heavy usage" in relative terms mean little if you have a 128GB modern SSD with good controllers and you don't fill it up completely with incompressible data or something. I would think Microsoft, having no particular major investments in the SSD industry either way but a tech support system that would be flooded with angry complaints if SSD's start dying off, would advocate an implied 3-year shelf life for storage data in a normal usage scenario. The fear is frankly overblown at this point for the average computer user, even a heavy gamer (it was more real in 2009), and things will only get better as new ECC technologies get going. Sites like Anandtech put their SSD's through hell and they come up with estimates which are comfortably far beyond the 3-years mark, even with worst case scenario data and conservative estimates of an SSD's capabilities. But of course, as I mentioned, turning off the pagefile is also an option. Microsoft doesn't like it, but people do it often enough and their Windows don't break. I'm just sayin', if you're going to have a pagefile at all, put it in the damn SSD because that's what it's for and don't lose sleep over NAND wear. You want your day-to-day usage random access memory to be quick, that's why we have RAM in the first place. The pagefile is RAM's backup, so why go slow? Plus, Don has a Samsung 830. Unless he's super unlucky, those things are quality. The 3000 usage cycle is conservative for the NAND flash Samsung put in there. |
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2012-10-14, 06:18 | Link #10 | |
Knight Errant
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Age: 35
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Quote:
Are you saying that having a page file on a hard disk could give worse performance then no page file at all. All that said, I'll play things by ear, if I notice slow downs, I might put a small (~2-4GB) page file on my SSD. If I have a pagefile on both the HDD, and the SSD, will the OS use the SSD page file first? Is there any way to tell it what order to use the separate page files? Also, if I want to reenable things like Hibernate or System Restore, is there any way for me to tell the OS to put the information on the HDD rather then the SSD? |
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2012-10-14, 08:47 | Link #12 |
Senior Member
Join Date: Jul 2007
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Please do not turn off the page file. You may have far more ram than you'll ever use, but a lot of programs are written assuming that it's there.
Pagefiles require a lot of writes, which can wear out SSDs, so you were correct to move it to a traditional hard drive.
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2012-10-14, 13:27 | Link #14 | |
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Philippines
Age: 47
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Quote:
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2012-10-14, 15:35 | Link #15 |
blinded by blood
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The "missing space" on a solid state drive is what's known as spare area. This is space that is set aside by the controller on the SSD to facilitate wear-leveling and other useful algorithms such as TRIM. My Intel 320 SSD is 120GB (which really means 128GB) and it's "missing" 17GB--in Windows the available space on the drive is 111GB.
There's no way to get it back, and even if you could, you wouldn't want it back. SSDs depend on spare area to ensure that the drive is written to evenly so that no NAND cells die prematurely due to uneven writes. Mentar is also correct in that you absolutely want your swap partition or page file to be on your SSD. Nearly all writes to swap are small random writes, which SSDs excel at and will greatly improve the overall speed and reaction time of your system. What you want to have on your SSD: Operating system Swap I/O-intensive applications (web browser, Photoshop/GIMP, MS Office/LibreOffice, 7zip, development environments) What you don't want on your SSD and can put on your HDD: Games (they use up way too much space and don't gain any appreciable benefit) Video Music Archived files (.7z, .tar.gz, etc) Any large application that is not I/O intensive Edit: And yes, if you have a Windows system, no matter how much RAM you have, even if you have 32GB or 64GB of RAM (though why you'd need this much I have no idea, unless you were running a lot of VMs at once), Windows will still use swap. You can't make it not use swap, and if there's no available swap, your applications will complain by going slow. It's possible to make a Linux system operate without swap if you have lots of RAM--most Android devices do not have a swap partition, and run everything in RAM without using virtual memory at all. But I wouldn't really recommend doing it, because not all applications may be coded with no swap partition in mind.
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2012-10-14, 17:50 | Link #16 |
lost in wonder forever...
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: edge of my dream in the land of twilight...ZzzZzZ
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Why not try having a tiny page file on the SSD while the larger page file is on the regular HD? On my computer I got it set to 512MB pagefile for the SSD and the rest on my regular HD.
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2012-10-14, 17:52 | Link #17 | |||
Knight Errant
Join Date: Dec 2007
Location: Dublin, Ireland
Age: 35
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Quote:
Though now I have a slightly different phenomenon. My folders add up to 16GB, but the SSD says only 12 GB is being occupied. Very strange. Quote:
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Also something to bear in mind is that my HDD is running on SATA 3, while my SSD is on SATA 6. |
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2012-10-14, 20:21 | Link #18 |
blinded by blood
Author
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The only appreciable benefit you'd get for games is faster loading times. Framerates would not increase.
There's an exception to this rule--the current version of FFXIV (1.23b) has a disk caching issue where it doesn't cache ahead far enough and a slow HDD can cause frame drops. Putting the game on my SSD solved the problem (mostly, anyway, it still drops frames but it's a poorly coded engine to begin with). FFXIV 2.0's new engine doesn't have the same problem at all, so it's not a performance boost but more a bandaid on a poorly-coded renderer.
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