Please help : laptop SSD as only drive

Question

My conventional hard drive is clicking (second time this year I've killed the drive), so I just bought a SSD to benefit from the lack of moving parts. However, I am deathly afraid of using this as the only drive in my laptop running Windows 7, because the swap file is going to kill the flash with the way I use my computer (seriously heavy memory access).

There are no other drive slots available to my computer, although I do have an esata port. I was thinking about getting an external conventional hard drive to use for the swap file, but I don't want to lug this around with me all the time, and it would pretty-much nullify any benefits of the SSD's lower power consumption. Furthermore, I spent so much on the SSD that I don't have much to spend on another external drive.

I have also thought about using a USB thumb drive for the swap file, but the fastest thumb drive I came across is the Patriot xPorter. I'm not sure if that's what I will go with in the end, but it makes me want to barf thinking about it.

What would you do if you were in my situation?

Answer 1

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.