Actually, the telemetry data Microsoft provides shows that the wear concern is drastically overblown too. Reads outnumber writes 40:1, and most writes are large--so write amplification is reduced. While I completely agree that more RAM is the better approach, I have to disagree with Steve's analysis. Steve has always had a tendency to be an alarmist blowhard anyway, IMO.
On the whole, I don't think SSDs have a practical reliability advantage over magnetic drives (even though they should, my experience with around 100 SSDs suggests otherwise). I doubt this drives many sales anyway. You buy an SSD for performance--so use it to maximize performance as much as possible. This includes putting your pagefile on the SSD. Under normal usage patterns, it should still last 5 or more years--by which time you're likely not to care anymore anyway. > -----Original Message----- > From: [email protected] [mailto:hardware- > [email protected]] On Behalf Of Brian Weeden > Sent: Tuesday, February 01, 2011 2:41 PM > To: [email protected] > Subject: Re: [H] SSD tech > > The conversation on Security Now I linked to directly refuted that post on > the MSDN blogs. The post looked at the performance issue, not at the issue > of wear on the SSD. > > Besides, who needs a pagefile anymore - it's still miles better to simply > have more ram. It's not like Ram is expensive. > > --------- > Brian > > > > > On Tue, Feb 1, 2011 at 3:33 PM, Winterlight > <[email protected]>wrote: > > > At 11:37 AM 2/1/2011, you wrote: > > > >> This is exactly why you shouldn't have your windows pagefile on your > SSD. > >> > > > > I don't think so... from > > > > > > http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-soli > > d-state-drives-and.aspx > > > > > > > > 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. > >
