Windows put my pagefile.... WHERE???

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

I installed Windows 8.1 Pro on this laptop on Christmas (because i was bored of waiting for Santa to come with the presents, which he did not ). After some tweaking (like a proper start menu and transparent Aero like Win7) i actually ended up liking it. Anyway, i'll talk about all that some other time.

I have a 64GB SSD and a 500GB HDD in this machine. Lately, i've been noticing that applications that i leave in my taskbar for a long time (i like doing that, if it's not using too much CPU, it stays open), took a brief pause to show when brought back to the foreground. Also, Windows was doing some updates and the whole system had slowed down to a crawl, with the disk drive light constantly on. Almost like...

Having a hunch, i thought i'd check the pagefile configuration. And... that's right folks... Windows had put my pagefile ON THE #!*)#$ SPINNING DISK! That explains the constant load/unload cycles i've been hearing from that drive - and it's already over double the rated value - it's at a whopping 1.298.379 cycles currently, with a rated maximum of just 600.000. Yeah, 1.3 million load/unload cycles, and the drive isn't even that old. WD and their stupidly short head parking timer.

Moved the pagefile to the SSD and the system is humming along nicely now. Also, that hard drive might actually stop running every once in a while, for a change. Anyway, that's something i did not expect at all. The only reason i bought a SSD is to avoid having to wait for a slow spinner to read from the pagefile. I have a SSD and Windows is installed on it, and it thought it would be a good idea to put the pagefile on the spinner. That's... i have no words. Good job M$...

[goontron]

Re: Windows put my pagefile.... WHERE???

ahh, but windows did it right!(for once) swapping is not good for SSDs.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Windows put my pagefile.... WHERE???

There's plenty of debate on that, and most evidence says there is little reason to worry about hitting the write limit on modern SSDs. This was a concern for the first generations, but no longer.

Besides, i don't care if my SSD only lasts me say 2 years - i bought it used for cheap and i'm going to eventually need more (fast) space anyway. I bought it to have a fast computer, not have it last a lifetime. I have set the backup utility to mirror my important folders to the spinner so i've got my rear end covered, so why shouldn't i enjoy a fast system?

I'm guessing that this is yet another marketing ploy - your average joe will not understand why his SSD+HDD machine runs slow, because he read everywhere that a SSD must be fast, and M$ and the PC makers have yet another opportunity to sell him a new computer, and all they have to change is simply omit the installation of a mechanical drive altogether.

[mockingbird]

Re: Windows put my pagefile.... WHERE???

I couldn't use a drive with head parking. Would make me nervous as heck, knowing each time it's parking, it's needlessly destroying itself.

Curious, this is a Scorpio Blue and it has head parking? I thought only green had that. First thing I did on my laptop's Seagate 640GB was run an HDD idling program that starts up with Windows (Need to set it up with task scheduler, because it needs to start with administrative rights), but eventually I found a trick to disable head parking on certain models of Seagate drives completely, in the firmware, so that it's permanently disabled even after a complete power cycle, and without the need for additional resident software.

Which AHCI controller are you using by the way? There's a bit of an art in getting the best AHCI OROM/Driver combination so that you have the best possible compatibility for your SSD. On a desktop it's pretty easy to modify the BIOS, especially if it's an AMI BIOS, laptops are a different story though.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Windows put my pagefile.... WHERE???

Yes, it is a Scorpio Blue. And yes, it typically parks its heads *a lot*. It's got 16272 power on hours, and with the number of load cycles posted above, it solves to 1.33 load cycles per minute. So it parks its heads at least every 45 seconds on average.

I did not know there was such a big fuss about controllers and drivers for a SSD. I have no idea which AHCI controller i'm using and i'm not quite sure i care. The system is fast, and benchmark results return slightly better than the manufacturer spec, so that's fine with me. It is not a top-spec SSD either. It's a Crucial C300. I have a Phoenix BIOS on this laptop and that can be modified easily as well, but i'm not sure i want to go thru that trouble (again).

[stj]

Re: Windows put my pagefile.... WHERE???

is the ssd flash using SLC or MLC chips?
if it's MLC dont push your luck!

[Per Hansson]

Re: Windows put my pagefile.... WHERE???

is the ssd flash using SLC or MLC chips?
if it's MLC dont push your luck!

SLC has never been used for consumer drives, and especially not on the price sensitive models like a C300.
It's not like it matters, even the TLC based drives can take a ridiculous amount of writes:

http://techreport.com/review/27062/t...in-after-1-5pb

Speaking about ridiculous you have come across one of the most annoying things in Windows: that programs are paged out when you minimize them.
No matter how much memory the system has!

A good example is if you have a very big file to extract, lets say a 13GB MKV backup file from your physical blurays
Now let's say this machine has 8GB of RAM, and you have a browser with allot of Windows open that uses around 5GB of memory (because we all love flash).

When you extract the file you first minimize the browser, the file will be extracted into RAM and then copied out to the media where you are extracting it.
So you will see RAM usage skyrocket, and then the system will say that it has completed to extract the file, but in actuality it will take another 5 minutes to write it from RAM to disk, and then when that is done the beautiful progress bar that was stuck at 99% for 5 minutes will go away.

Now guess what happens if you where to do the awfully crazy choice of maximizing the browser when the file had been copied to RAM but not yet written out to disk?
Yes, that is right, the system would have paged out the 5GB browser and replaced it with a fucking MKV file, and now has to read it all back, while at the same time writing the MKV, causing excessive disk trashing and making the process take forever.
Another fine coding choice by Microsoft which can't be changed!

[c_hegge]

Re: Windows put my pagefile.... WHERE???

If I'm installing Windows on a PC with an SSD and a mechanical HDD, I always unplug the mechanical drive during the installation, specifically for that reason. Also, windows won't boot if you remove the mechanical drive.

And yes, I agree that the swap file definitely belongs on the SSD. Modern SSDs can do so many write cycles that it's not a problem. Even with heavy usage, most can manage 10 years of more when plenty of NAND to spare. Samsung even offers a 10 year warranty on their new 850 pro series.

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Windows put my pagefile.... WHERE???

If I'm installing Windows on a PC with an SSD and a mechanical HDD, I always unplug the mechanical drive during the installation, specifically for that reason. Also, windows won't boot if you remove the mechanical drive.

I had actually unplugged the mechanical drive during installation. Because it still had the Win7 install on it (i removed that later), and Windows 8.1 would not create a System Reserved partition seeing as the spinner already had one. So i installed with the SSD only, to get the System Reserved partition and everything that goes on it, bootloader and whatnot, installed to the SSD.

Yet it still dropped the pagefile to the spinning disk. This might've happened during some updates. I read somewhere that Windows 8 will put the pagefile on the drive that sees the least amount of writes in the system. Maybe it would be a good idea for it to also run a small benchmark before it decides that.

[Uranium-235]

Re: Windows put my pagefile.... WHERE???

how much ram do you have? Unless you're running a checkdsk, you can disable the swap completely if you have enough ram (8GB+, prefer 12 or higher). I never had any issues disabling the swap in win7 unless I ran check disk on an external hard drive, it would then run out of memory (thats just the way chkdsk works)

[Th3_uN1Qu3]

Re: Windows put my pagefile.... WHERE???

I have 4GB DDR3, which i'm not that keen on upgrading because i'd have to swap out both sticks. 8GB is also the max that this laptop will take. I used to have 8GB in my desktop since 5 years ago, but i haven't been doing really heavy stuff like multiple virtual machines in a long time. I find that with a SSD, i hardly need more than 4GB.

So yes, it's a better idea that the pagefile remains enabled in my case.