Using a SSD as my only drive on a laptop
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Chapters
00:00 Using A Ssd As My Only Drive On A Laptop
01:07 Accepted Answer Score 13
03:10 Thank you
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Full question
https://superuser.com/questions/262635/u...
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https://meta.stackexchange.com/help/lice...
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Tags
#ssd #swap
#avk47
ACCEPTED ANSWER
Score 13
Windows 7 is heavily optimised to make full use of both the advantages and disadvantages of SSDs. There's a blog post from the Windows 7 engineering team about it: Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives
Windows 7 will continue to use the swap file on the SSD, but this is fine as the usage pattern is very good for SSDs, the number of reads will generally far outweigh the number of writes and both are in a pattern that leverage the SSDs strengths well. Wear levelling will also lengthen the time before failure.
Windows 7 will automatically disable pointless operations like defragmentation on the drive for you as well, saving precious writes to the drive.
How much memory do you have installed in the system at the moment? If it is less than 2GB then I would look at that as your next upgrade if you are using memory as heavily as you claim, if you have 2-4GB or more then I would just let Windows do its thing and get on with using it as you would any other drive.
Hard drives fail sooner or later too, and I would be surprised if you kill an SSD in a shorter time than it takes the average spinning platter drive to die.
To address your key concern, a quote from the page I linked:
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.