OT: What is best for SSD performance?

[OleBoy]

My SSD's are installed. Each 256gb. One W7, one for Prepar3D. Slowly I'm getting everything back to where it needs to be.
Something crossed my mind about configuration, pagefile, settings, etc. Where to put what to get the best performance.

All input will be appreciated.

 

[Daube]

SSD have a limited life.
It is usually a good idea to prevent the existence of the pagefile on them, because the pagefile will cause useless "writes" on your SSDs.
If you have enough RAM on your computer, you probably don't need a pagefile at all.

I have only 6 Gb of RAM. It's not enough to play FSX, because the OS and linked mecanisms will usually consumme all of it. So I need a pagefile to avoid OOM errors. I put it on my "normal" (non-SSD) hardrive, that's enough.

 

[OleBoy]

Your knowledge is good to know. Like any drive I suppose, they all have a certain life span. I've got 16gb of memory so I gather I'm in good shape there. But doesn't the pagefile get created automatically on the drive?

Thanks, Daube.

 

[Daube]

To alter the page file settings you have to go through this path:
- control panel
- system and security
- system
- advanced system settings (in the left menu)
- "settings" button in the "performance" section of the popup
- "advanced" tabstrip
- "modify" button in the "virtual memory" section (I'm not sure about the english names here, my Windows is not in english language)

In the window that appears, you should see the list of your drives, and next to them some numbers showing the size limits (minimum, maximum) of the corresponding page file.
To modify that, you have to click on one of the drives, then choose an option below (automatic size, fixed size, disabled), then click on "apply" button to apply these settings to THIS drive. You have to do it for each drive.

If you still have a normal HDD in your computer, then I would suggest to define a fix-size page file on that one only, and disable the page file on each of the SSDs.
If you don't have any normal HDD, then I would suggest you to try to disable the page file on both SSDs nevertheless, and see if you experience any problems.
Normally, if it's just for gaming, you shouldn't get any issues. Problems may occur when performing memory-consumming tasks, like photo edition, or video edition etc...
If this is the case, you might want to enable a fixed size page file (fixed size means that minimum size and maximum size have the same value) somewhere.

 

[Scratch]

Thanks for the tip Daube! I just cleared out a lot of hard drive space on my SSD.:salute:

 

[wombat666]

The "SSD Short Life" story might have been valid in the beginning but the present generation are less likely to fail than the average platter drive.

I run my OS (Win7 64) on one SSD and FSX on a second, several variations of FS9 occupy one of the WD Raptors and my Race Sims run on the other.

For myself, one 256GB SSD is more than enough space for the OS and the usual suspects, without worrying about the pagefile.
I've limited the size on my system drive but I've done that for decades, the write/re-write 'wear' on an SSD is not an issue for me.
On all my drives 'System Restore' is disabled, a waste of space IMHO.

The only 'best practice' point I would suggest is to just limit the second SSD installation to what you want to fly over which areas you enjoy, at present FSX has everything I want and it takes up just under 100GD of a 256GB drive.
And both my OS and FSX installations are backed onto external drives.