Using old SSD for page file. Would it do anything?

[The red spirit]

I have been wondering if there could be any improvement in performance or whatever else, if I reused my old SSD. Basically drive is no longer useful for me, it's small, I have no use for it, don't want to recycle, because it works and not worth selling, as it is worthless. It's Samsung 840 Evo SSD (SATA). Would it do anything at all?

 

[Nailezs]

I have been wondering if there could be any improvement in performance or whatever else, if I reused my old SSD. Basically drive is no longer useful for me, it's small, I have no use for it, don't want to recycle, because it works and not worth selling, as it is worthless. It's Samsung 840 Evo SSD (SATA). Would it do anything at all?

If you're currently using a new (ish) SSD for your OS, reusing your old SSD for your page file would potentially (probably not noticeably) decrease your performance

 

[The red spirit]

If you're currently using a new (ish) SSD for your OS, reusing your old SSD for your page file would potentially (probably not noticeably) decrease your performance

Despite the age difference they are probably similarly performing drives. My main OS SSD, is still SATA drive and it's WD Blue, so it's not that fast even for SATA drive. I just wonder if having a huge page file can help somehow. Well I actually put SSD into computer and set page file to that old SSD and I'm not sure if all I'm seeing is placebo or there is a bit of smoothness improvement. I also have no idea how I could test performance of page file. I only know that Windows uses a gigabyte or two of it when idle and with FF open, page file size increases too.

 

[freeagent]

I would try it. Might not even notice a difference

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

Under high IO load it could be faster, as the load would be spread across two SATA channels. Most likely you would not see a performance increase but you would be saving wear across your main SSD.


@freeagent this is something you could try instead of disabling your pagefile to save wear.

 

[cvaldes]

I have been wondering if there could be any improvement in performance or whatever else, if I reused my old SSD. Basically drive is no longer useful for me, it's small, I have no use for it, don't want to recycle, because it works and not worth selling, as it is worthless. It's Samsung 840 Evo SSD (SATA). Would it do anything at all?

It really depends on the performance of your current primary drive and your individual usage case(s).

When solid state storage first emerged, it was too cost prohibitive for people to install a full operating system on it, so some used it in the manner you describe or as a scratch disk for certain tasks.

Later there were hybrid SSD-HDD combos design to speed up performance by putting more frequently accessed disk data on the faster SSD. Apple called this a Fusion Drive and it existed a handful of their desktop Mac models for a period of time.

I usually have multiple SSDs in my systems: m.2 NVMe Gen4 (always the boot drive), m.2 NVMe Gen3 (a secondary drive) and SATA SSDs (a tertiary media drive). There are some external 3.5" HDDs that are really just used for offline file storage (video files, old photos, game backups, etc.).

The best thing to do is to try it out yourself and see if there's any tangible benefit for your usage case. What might work for Person X might not work for you and vice versa.

If you have a large amount of RAM, your system is probably writing to the pagefile less frequently. Remember that SSDs aren't like spinners where the drive head can only be at one place at one time. Multiple simultaneous operations can happen on an SSD and there's no seek time involved like the old spinners.

For one of my older, smaller SATA SSDs, I ended up putting it in an extra enclosure for shuttling around files between systems. This external SSD has much faster transfer rates than SDHC cards or USB thumbdrives.

 

[The red spirit]

Under high IO load it could be faster, as the load would be spread across two SATA channels. Most likely you would not see a performance increase but you would be saving wear across your main SSD.

I actually disabled page file on main drive and now have 128GB page file on old SSD.

 

[Athlonite]

That's exactly how I run my system NVMe for OS n Games and I use my 860 Evo for the pagefile doesn't seem to have slowed my system down at all and I keep a lot of writes off of my 980 Pro

 

[The red spirit]

When solid state storage first emerged, it was too cost prohibitive for people to install a full operating system on it, so some used it in the manner you describe or as a scratch disk for certain tasks.

It was smart to use a whole separate HDD for OS only as it gets randomly read or written to, meanwhile your software drive can be left undisturbed and focused just on task, therefore no waiting for access. And it might be worth to split RAID 0 of two drives and have them work separately because of this too.

Later there were hybrid SSD-HDD combos design to speed up performance by putting more frequently accessed disk data on the faster SSD. Apple called this a Fusion Drive and it existed a handful of their desktop Mac models for a period of time.

You could buy them until recently for PCs too, even laptop ones. I found that concept a bit bizarre, because hard drives already have small cache, so what is SSD portion supposed to do? Work like L2 cache? Also those drives ended up caching various things, but chances of them caching something that you truly need weren't great and thus you only got HDD speed in such case.

 

[freeagent]

Under high IO load it could be faster, as the load would be spread across two SATA channels. Most likely you would not see a performance increase but you would be saving wear across your main SSD.


@freeagent this is something you could try instead of disabling your pagefile to save wear.

I have it on right now, I reinstalled last week and did not disable it this time

 

[cvaldes]

It was smart to use a whole separate HDD for OS only as it gets randomly read or written to, meanwhile your software drive can be left undisturbed and focused just on task, therefore no waiting for access. And it might be worth to split RAID 0 of two drives and have them work separately because of this too.

That was a long time ago. My Mac mini 2010 had two separate 512GB 2.5" spinners. I put the OS on one and put my user account on the other. In 2013 I cloned the system drive to a 128GB SSD. It was like a completely different machine, biggest performance jump I have ever seen.

Today's consumer grade SSD products are very capable for handling the daily needs of Joe Consumer. There are always optimizations that pros should look at, for example people editing 8K video.

But for mundane usage, having the operating system and your user account on the fastest drive is fine. Having a fairly fast, mostly empty auxiliary SSD is convenient especially if you are repurposing hardware you already have.

Believe it or not, those software engineers at Apple, Microsoft, etc. who work on operating systems have a pretty good idea of what works best for most people in most situations. Doing things like moving your pagefile to a different device usually doesn't provide any benefits for laypeople.

 

[ERazer]

I thought by default page file stays in memory, in my case I have 32gb kinna pointless to move it to ssd which is a lot slower.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

so what is SSD portion supposed to do? Work like L2 cache?

No, the cache in a HDD is a "write cache" and SSDs have them as well. It was typical flash storage but the drive decided what data to store on the high-speed storage, just like StoreMI or Primocache does now with multiple drives.

I thought by default page file stays in memory, in my case I have 32gb kinna pointless to move it to ssd which is a lot slower.

Nope, it adds to the memory. If you happen to run out of memory, stuff would start crashing. Windows creates a place to store data in your drives to free up some space for applications that need the extra memory.

 

[ExcuseMeWtf]

If you have enough RAM, page file is rarely used to begin with, so doubt it will help.
If you do not have enough RAM, it will thrash on old SSD instead.

 

[Wirko]

Put the SSD in an enclosure and enjoy the speed of a fast external USB drive. Well, unless you already have enough of those.

 

[cvaldes]

I thought by default page file stays in memory, in my case I have 32gb kinna pointless to move it to ssd which is a lot slower.

Nah, the page file is one component of the operating system's memory management design.

The faster the memory, the more expensive it is. Manufacturers thus use very small amounts of the fastest memory and larger amounts of slower memory. So the system goes from L1 cache to L2 cache to L3 cache to system RAM and finally to a page file on a disk since it is the cheapest and slowest. This is why people often say that adding more RAM is one of the best ways to improve system performance: so the system isn't writing to disk. This was especially important when people were running on spinning hard drives.

Ideally one has enough RAM in their system to handle their typical usages without going to disk.

 

[80-watt Hamster]

If nothing else, it'll free your RAM's capacity from you OS drive.

 

[The red spirit]

If nothing else, it'll free your RAM's capacity from you OS drive.

I wonder how close does SATA SSD get to old RAM like DDR 200

Believe it or not, those software engineers at Apple, Microsoft, etc. who work on operating systems have a pretty good idea of what works best for most people in most situations. Doing things like moving your pagefile to a different device usually doesn't provide any benefits for laypeople.

Nonsense, before Windows 8.1 Windows was dogshit slow to load on HDD, they ignored it for decade if not more. Windows XP took like 5 minutes to load on 7200 spinning rust.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

I wonder how close does SATA SSD get to old RAM like DDR 200

DDR has a 64 bit channel width. 8*200 = 1600 MB/s. For strictly sequential reads, the 840 (non EVO, not sure the difference) is comparable to low-end SDRAM (SDR).

 

[Athlonite]

Nonsense, before Windows 8.1 Windows was dogshit slow to load on HDD, they ignored it for decade if not more. Windows XP took like 5 minutes to load on 7200 spinning rust.

Ah well that's nonsense windows 7 boots in less than a minute and WinXP was the same on an 7200rpm HDD atleast it did for me the only time windows takes a long time to boot is
A: You have a lot of shit starting with windows>> Turn shit off so it doesn't start with windows and just start it when you need it
B: You haven't defragged your HDD in over a year>>> Defrag your HDD after running a disk clean on it getting rid of the dross
C: Your HDD is having read errors requiring repeat read requests>>>> Run chkdsk /F /R if that comes back all clear then run SFC /scannow to repair any windows file problems

 

[The red spirit]

Ah well that's nonsense windows 7 boots in less than a minute and WinXP was the same on an 7200rpm HDD atleast it did for me the only time windows takes a long time to boot is
A: You have a lot of shit starting with windows>> Turn shit off so it doesn't start with windows and just start it when you need it
B: You haven't defragged your HDD in over a year>>> Defrag your HDD after running a disk clean on it getting rid of the dross
C: Your HDD is having read errors requiring repeat read requests>>>> Run chkdsk /F /R if that comes back all clear then run SFC /scannow to repair any windows file problems

Dude, I wasn't that noobish, I kept my HDD defraged, it sure as hell wasn't failing and I don't have 100 Bonzibudies loading. HDDs were just slow. And if your first point is about turning off services and reg hacks, then I can tell you that those things can make your life needlessly complicated, bork Windows in interesting ways and in ways you may not unbork it later. My secondary Windows computer runs on HDD and 7, it certainly doesn't boot in minute and it never booted that fast on any HDD, maybe with WD Raptor RAID 0, but that's far beyond 7200 rpm spinning rust. You can also add some hacks to make PC boot faster, like using fast boot, but I don't mind memory check at boot up and back then it wasn't a common feature, not to mention that POSTing itself could have taken as much as 20-30 seconds on some boards of that vintage.

 

[Athlonite]

Dude, I wasn't that noobish, I kept my HDD defraged, it sure as hell wasn't failing and I don't have 100 Bonzibudies loading. HDDs were just slow. And if your first point is about turning off services and reg hacks, then I can tell you that those things can make your life needlessly complicated, bork Windows in interesting ways and in ways you may not unbork it later. My secondary Windows computer runs on HDD and 7, it certainly doesn't boot in minute and it never booted that fast on any HDD, maybe with WD Raptor RAID 0, but that's far beyond 7200 rpm spinning rust. You can also add some hacks to make PC boot faster, like using fast boot, but I don't mind memory check at boot up and back then it wasn't a common feature, not to mention that POSTing itself could have taken as much as 20-30 seconds on some boards of that vintage.

Have you tried BootVis it'll show you where windows is hagin up waiting for something during boot

you can grab it here BootVis

 

[The red spirit]

Have you tried BootVis it'll show you where windows is hagin up waiting for something during boot

you can grab it here BootVis

Isn't it really badly outdated? It says it's for XP.

Edit: nvm, doesn't work with 7

 

[Athlonite]

Isn't it really badly outdated? It says it's for XP.

Edit: nvm, doesn't work with 7

Bootracer then or https://www.raymond.cc/blog/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=2438 which is MS Windows Performance tools does the same thing as bootvis but comes from microsoft

 

[The red spirit]

Bootracer then or https://www.raymond.cc/blog/wp-content/plugins/download-monitor/download.php?id=2438 which is MS Windows Performance tools does the same thing as bootvis but comes from microsoft

Tried, measured 74-72 seconds per boot. Ended up disappointed, because it just says that Windows takes xx seconds to load, but doesn't give any more details. Out of all programs, only one was "problematic". Why quote marks? Because it's AMD Catalyst and "problem" was that it took 2 seconds to load. That sounds fast for HDD, but like I said spinning rust is just spinning rust, it's slow and there's nothing you can do about it.