SSD & Page filing question

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iceredwing

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I recall reading that disabling the page filing (in vista/xp) would improve SSD performance. I could also put the page-filing towards another hard drive outside of the SSD.

Since this is regarding a netbook, I was thinking of purchasing a high capacity SDHC and use that for the page filing on my netboook. What i'm curious about is wouldn't performance actually suffer since the performance of SDHC cards tend to be slow compared to the conventional hard drive. Would i just be better off disabling the P.F.? Normally this wouldn't concern me but since current netbooks have a limitation of 2GB there is a decent possibility that I could run out of ram
 
You really can't turn off page file in Windows. If you turn it off, Windows will still page out memory to the system drive anyways. Don't believe me, turn off all page files and reboot. You will still find a Pagefile.sys file in the root of your system drive.

Most SD cards would be even slower than the SSD, so you would be adding a fast hard drive, then hamstringing the rest of the system. Also, I don't think Windows will like paging to a removable drive.

Don
 
I don't remember the SDHC being an option on my netbook (Win7) for the pagefile.
 
thanks for that info, hopefully it is the same for vista / win7 since i intend to use one of the 2 on my hp mini
 
"You will still find a Pagefile.sys file in the root of your system drive."

Default Win7 install, check C:\, pagefile.sys. Go disable pagefile, reboot, check c:\ no pagefile.sys.
 
not sure why it isn't giving you that option. But i haven't played around with windows 7 yet.

But i've read that it was a one of the optimizations that you could do to improve SSD performance.
 
Well moving the page file to a separate (equally fast) drive would improve performance because Windows is writing to disc all the time anyway, so this alleviates some of the writes, and also since you will eventually need to READ from the pagefile, you would optimally need a drive thats just as fast as your OS drive.

As far as using an external memory storage on a single drive-limited laptop, well write performance is excellent on mobile flash but read performance is TERRIBLE so realistically you are better off just paging to your (single) HD.
 
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