SSD advice needed

[Dawn1113]

My brother has promised to give me his 60gb Intel SSD when he upgrades his system soon. I've got a Corsair SSD for my OS/boot drive now and two mechanical drives for games, pagefile and a few small apps.

Should I use the 60gb SSD for SSD caching to speed up my games/pagefile mechanical drive? How much of a performance boost would I be getting with a 60gb SSD for caching?

Would it be better if I just put pagefile and a few small apps there? Will pagefile activity wear out the SSD too quickly? (I should point out that I plan to get more RAM soon so I can put pagefile on a RAM disk, so the second option just might be a temporary setup.)

Could you guys maybe suggest other options as to how I could make best use of the extra SSD on my machine?

Thanks in advance for your help.

 

[cliffordcooley]

I know this does not answer your question but you may find it interesting.

If you have plenty of RAM to run all your applications, you wouldn't really need a pagefile. Pagefiles are needed when the system requires more memory than physically in the machine.

I have 8GB memory and rarely see 3GB usage. Several years ago I ran Windows XP without a pagefile on 512MB memory for a long time. One day I actually ran out of memory and the system crashed. Ever since this day I have set a small pagefile just to prevent a system crash. I currently have a 1GB pagefile to assist my 8GB of physical memory if ever needed.

With all this said, I'm not sure how much a pagefile is even used on a system that does not run out of physical memory. If the pagefile is never used then the write cycles for SSD will not be effected. I'm also interested in knowing pagefile usage statistics for a system that has plenty of physical memory.

 

[Dawn1113]

To be honest, I really wouldn't know how to accurately monitor pagefile usage on my system. I've got 8gb RAM at the moment. I keep a 4gb pagefile on a separate mechanical drive from my OS. It's the only file on that drive -- save for a few small apps (mostly system monitoring applications which I rarely use).

I've read up a little on this and yes, you're right, it is interesting. The mantra is that the more RAM you have, the less Windows uses pagefile. Still, I'm really tempted to think that there are instances when Windows will opt to use pagefile over RAM when pagefile is available. If you have a pagefile Windows will use it in spite of 8gb RAM. Because I did try running without a pagefile for a while and the performance boost was readily apparent.

Moreover, the fact that my pagefile is now mounted on a mechanical drive makes the instances of pagefile usage even more pronounced as it is "bouncing off" a much faster, much quieter SSD. The sudden drop in performance and the sound of the disk working are all the more obvious when the OS makes use of the pagefile. It seems to do so most when I play games which are heavy on textures and also those which are CPU-intensive. But then I'm a newb and I may be misinterpreting what I'm seeing.

I'd like to be adventurous and go your route: no pagefile. But I'm afraid I'd worry too much and forget to have fun -- as if often the case with me. That's why I thought that perhaps putting pagefile on an SSD would be a viable option.