SSD Win7: Sleeping, Paging, Superfetch, Indexing

provoko

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So I'm going to be installing Win7 on an SSD and I was wondering about four things: Sleeping, Paging, Superfetch, and indexing.

First of all, this link says Win7 on SSDs turns off superfetch and defragging. So I don't have to manually turn off superfetch, correct?

Peopple have been saying not to have a page file on the SSD, is that true? But the link above says that page file reads to writes are 40 to 1 and are usually 4kb which makes an SSD perfect for a pagefile.

I read that I should get rid of my hibernation file, so does that mean sleeping isn't good either for Win7 on an SSD? I hope not, but I was worried about it because I regularly use sleep.

Indexing options, should this be running? I love the start menu search bar for programs, and the search bar in folders for finding files, I don't want to lose that quickness.

I've been reading so much information from people saying to turn things on and turn them off, what's the real answer??

Thank you for any help.

EDIT:
Thanks for the advice everyone. I'm going to leave everything as is, except I want to reduce the page file because I'm probably going to have 8gb to 16gb of ram, so what can I safely reduce the page file to for my SSD? I'm willing to give up crash dumps. So whats a good number, 1gb, 4gb?
 
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I followed the advice from that link. I let Windows just do it's thing. The only real change I made is that I put the Index database on one of my mechanical drives, and I set my pagefile at a static 400MBs, since any lower would pop up a warning. I don't use hibernate, so that is disabled because it would use up 6GB for no reason. Most of these "guides" are attempting to limit the amount of write cycles being used, since everyone is being overly afraid of using up their drive. The best thing for you to do is to test all these different options, and see what works best for you and your usage.
 
I left superfetch and page file on for my computer, I don't see anything wrong with leaving those two on and it seems to me that a SSD is perfect for a page file.
 
Smartest advise you'll get.

Microsoft knows what won't help you, and that's why some stuff is disabled. They've already done all this research for you. Just install and forget :)
I'd re-enable Superfetch even if I had an Intel SSD; memory is much, much faster than it.
 
First of all, this link says Win7 on SSDs turns off superfetch and defragging. So I don't have to manually turn off superfetch, correct?
It turns off Defragging for sure but if it does not turn off Superfetch, I would still leave it on. SSD's are fast but loading from memory is still going to be faster.
Peopple have been saying not to have a page file on the SSD, is that true? But the link above says that page file reads to writes are 40 to 1 and are usually 4kb which makes an SSD perfect for a pagefile.
Why would you not use a Pagefile with an SSD? A pagefile takes up space, which is a valuable on an SSD but you still need one. I would consider moving the pagefile to a secondary HDD if you had one but if not, leave the pagefile alone.

Page File is NOT an enemy. It improves performance. Please people, stop spreading this rumor that has been around since Windows 95.

I read that I should get rid of my hibernation file, so does that mean sleeping isn't good either for Win7 on an SSD? I hope not, but I was worried about it because I regularly use sleep.
Then don't touch it. People may only suggest deleting the Hibernation file because it takes up as much room on the drive, as you have memory.
Indexing options, should this be running? I love the start menu search bar for programs, and the search bar in folders for finding files, I don't want to lose that quickness.
Again yes, Indexing is not the enemy, just like the Page File. Even if you have an SSD, that alone is not going to decrease search times drastically. Indexing allows Windows to find files and programs faster, so why would you turn it off? The Start menu search bar is one of the greatest things since sliced bread. The Indexing service only runs/takes system resources when you are adding media/files to indexed locations. It's not going to turn on all of a sudden and cause performance loss in the middle of a game or something. If you are adding a lot of media or moving files around that cause Indexing to turn on, you're probably not doing anything else that is highly dependent on every last system resource available to begin with.
I've been reading so much information from people saying to turn things on and turn them off, what's the real answer??
The real answer is, install Windows 7 and leave it alone.

Where's Joe been?
 
It turns off Defragging for sure but if it does not turn off Superfetch

It says right here:
Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?

Yes, for most systems with SSDs.

If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn’t have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadDrive will all be disabled.

Initially, we had configured all of these features to be off on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance regressions on some systems. In root causing those regressions, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With Superfetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.

Everything you said is good advice. I'm going to install windows 7, i'll probably remove hibernation for space especially since I don't use it, and leave everything as is.

But I was thinking of reducing the page file because I may have anywhere from 8gb to 16gb of ram, soooooooooo what can I safely reduce it, I'm willing to completely give up crash dump files.
 
I'd re-enable Superfetch even if I had an Intel SSD; memory is much, much faster than it.
True however it's not a HUGE advantage anymore, just an improvement.

OP- honestly- just install Windows 7 and leave it alone. Simple as that. Microsoft has done their research on this stuff.
 
It says right here:


Everything you said is good advice. I'm going to install windows 7, i'll probably remove hibernation for space especially since I don't use it, and leave everything as is.

But I was thinking of reducing the page file because I may have anywhere from 8gb to 16gb of ram, soooooooooo what can I safely reduce it, I'm willing to completely give up crash dump files.


I've always felt that when you have 8GB+ ram, a static 512Mb-1GB pagefile is the sweetspot. You get all the advantages of the pagefile, without using an unnecessary amount of room. I've been keeping small static pagefiles since Vista was released(512MB), and I've yet to run into a problem. I have found out that if you try to set it less than 400MB, you'll get a warning stating:
'If you disable the paging file or set the initial size to less than 400MB and a system error occurs, Windows might not record the details that could help identify the problem. Do you want to continue?"
 
I've always felt that when you have 8GB+ ram, a static 512Mb-1GB pagefile is the sweetspot. You get all the advantages of the pagefile, without using an unnecessary amount of room.

Until a rogue program goes crazy and tries to allocate a crapton of RAM that you don't have, and your system crashes.

Again- leave it alone.
 
Until a rogue program goes crazy and tries to allocate a crapton of RAM that you don't have, and your system crashes.

Again- leave it alone.

If I ever come into a situation like this, then I'll agree. Till then, I stand by recommendation. Even purposely pushing my system to the max, memory wise, I've never came across and app that will crash. The most I've ever gotten is a warning.
 
But I was thinking of reducing the page file because I may have anywhere from 8gb to 16gb of ram, soooooooooo what can I safely reduce it, I'm willing to completely give up crash dump files.

I've always felt that when you have 8GB+ ram, a static 512Mb-1GB pagefile is the sweetspot. You get all the advantages of the pagefile, without using an unnecessary amount of room.
You don't understand how the Page file works do you?

What if you have 8GB of ram and it's full. You have an application that needs 2GB of ram but you only have a 512MB page file. Where's 2GB of low priority data in memory going to be paged to, to release that 2GB of ram for the application that needs. All that is going to do is result in stuff having to be reloaded from the hard drive, reprocessed then reloaded back into memory, to be paged again; rather than allowing it to just be paged then picked back up when it needs it.

You guys need to get over the idea of paying for all this technology and just letting it go to waste like people were trying to get others to do when Superfetch came out (OMFG 0 MB FREE @!!!@(#@!&!&!)
It's not like your hard drive can't be doing work while your on the PC. It's not just for powered-off storage.
 
Good example bigdog... That's exactly what I'm talking about.

If I ever come into a situation like this, then I'll agree. Till then, I stand by recommendation. Even purposely pushing my system to the max, memory wise, I've never came across and app that will crash. The most I've ever gotten is a warning.
It's the seatbelt mentality again.
"I've never been in a wreck, so I obviously I don't my seatbelt."
"I've never gotten a virus, so obviously I don't need anti-virus."
"I've never had a problem with running this pagefile, I might as well keep doing it this way."

It's all the same train of thought. OMG!!! Windows is using 8GB for my paging file on my 1TB drive!!!! Heaven forbid it :rolleyes: We can't give up that 0.8% of space :rolleyes: But instead it's better to put all your data at risk because you think you know better than the company that's put billions of dollars of research into this stuff.
 
Smartest advise you'll get.

Microsoft knows what won't help you, and that's why some stuff is disabled. They've already done all this research for you. Just install and forget :)

...and you'll see it all over threads in these forums.

If you disable all of the Win7 speed features the moment you install an SSD, you might want to ask yourself why you even got an SSD?

Let Win7 do it all. Forget the page file size (unless you want to make it static instead of expanding and contracting as Windows dictates). I even love having IE Temp files on my SSD because it makes for the absolute snappiest web browsing I've ever enjoyed. I moved these files to an HDD for comparison and the snapinesss was gone.

If you buy an SSD, please use it. It's cell-level failure rate is no worse than an HDD. And buttoning it down by disabling all the features just turns it into an expensive HDD.
 
ehhhhh I think you guys are being silly

I think there is nothing wrong with customizing your OS. I used to follow blackviper till I realized it doesn't matter if I just buy more ram. But in this case, buying more space on an SSD is crazy.

Some of you are telling me to keep an 8gb hibernation file I'm never going to use and a 12gb page file that I could never imagine using. What's left of my SSD? I'm better off with 1gb of ram or not even buying an SSD.

I think I'll take SicKlown42012's recommendation, thanks.
 
Good example bigdog... That's exactly what I'm talking about.


It's the seatbelt mentality again.
"I've never been in a wreck, so I obviously I don't my seatbelt."
"I've never gotten a virus, so obviously I don't need anti-virus."
"I've never had a problem with running this pagefile, I might as well keep doing it this way."

It's all the same train of thought. OMG!!! Windows is using 8GB for my paging file on my 1TB drive!!!! Heaven forbid it :rolleyes: We can't give up that 0.8% of space :rolleyes: But instead it's better to put all your data at risk because you think you know better than the company that's put billions of dollars of research into this stuff.

Why on Earth would I put a pagefile on a slow mechanical drive? The fact is, for my usage habits, my setup fits me perfectly. In two years, not a single problem doing things the I have, means more to me than you're sarcastic posting. Microsoft has to do things that will work on a wide range of hardware configurations, so what they set as default will not always be the best. Windows tends to be a bit too aggressive with paging, in my experience. Even when I was only using about 4GB of RAM, the computer was paging, which even on a SSD is noticeably slow. Shrinking my pagefile forces Windows to be more selective in what it pages, and for me, has an actual advantage, at least subjectively. I'm not saying that everyone should follow my lead, I'm just stating my opinion and why I believe it. It's up to other people to decide on what they want to do. I believe that there are people on this board that are under the opinion that everything Microsoft does is perfect, and any attempt to change things to suit you means you're an idiot. Any one knows that is a complete fallacy. No software, by anyone, fits everyone's needs out of the box.
 
I used to follow blackviper till I realized it doesn't matter if I just buy more ram.
BlackViper is a laughing stock around here... Old methods don't work on totally revamped OSes. His stuff has led more people here with issues than it's ever saved. They undo his suggestions and *magically* things start working again.

He's one of those idiots, along with the Mac crowd, that when Vista came out said "It uses all my RAM! 0MB free!! OMGZ, WE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!
Thus showed you how disabling Superfetch made Windows use your RAM "better" :rolleyes:

Some of you are telling me to keep an 8gb hibernation file I'm never going to use and a 12gb page file that I could never imagine using.
The pagefile isn't just used for when an application allocated more RAM than it needs to. I'd suggest going and researching exactly what it is and what it does before making such ignorant statements.

Once you actually stop and think about this- there's an EVEN GREATER reason to have PageFiles on SSDs than there is on physical drives. Just remember-pagefile is more related to RAM than your disk. So if your system has 6GB of RAM and you move from HDD to SSD- nothing changes with your RAM. The disk changes. Since the disk is FASTER you'll actually have GREATER benefit with your paging file. Your amount of RAM is the same- IE, your need for a pagefile remains the same.

In two years, not a single problem doing things the I have, means more to me than you're sarcastic posting.
Again... I haven't ever had a virus on my machine, I guess I don't need AV?
Sounds stupid right? Well, same exact argument that you're using right here. Now if you had a legitimate reason for doing so (Which I've failed to see listed- I just went back and re-read everything) you may have a point, but "it's worked so far" doesn't mean anything.

Microsoft has to do things that will work on a wide range of hardware configurations, so what they set as default will not always be the best.
WHICH IS WHY THEY CHANGE THE DEFAULTS BASED ON THE KIND OF HARDWARE INSTALLED.

AMAZING- ISN'T IT?????????????

You people keep acting like this is XP... One setting to rule them all. It's not. It's Windows 7, it's smart enough to know what to do to run at its peak efficiency, get used to it.

Windows tends to be a bit too aggressive with paging, in my experience. Even when I was only using about 4GB of RAM, the computer was paging, which even on a SSD is noticeably slow.
Like I told the above poster- you need to go read up on exactly what paging is, then.
Here's a hint: Read operations on the paging file occurr 40 times more often than writing operations. Surely some slight critical thinking would tell you what that means.
 
I've never looked much into the pagefile myself, normally leaving it at the default setting and letting everything run it's course. I am curious as to one thing though, does Windows use the page file even if you never run out of physical memory space?
 
+1 TechieSooner. Finally some sense on this thread.
 
Largely, Windows handles these sorts of things well enough that changing them is probably not necessary. But, with SSDs offering substantially less storage per dollar, it isn't a terrible idea to measure peak page file usage during your machine's use, and set it accordingly. I disagree with disabling it altogether, though. Turning off hibernation if you never use the feature is another way to save some space. Obviously, virtually every system and their application(s) are non-identical, so what works best for one is not going to be so on another.
 
does Windows use the page file even if you never run out of physical memory space?
Exactly.

Turning off hibernation if you never use the feature is another way to save some space.
Yep, there's some stuff that's enabled by default that you can actually save space with.
Hibernation, System Restore, Shadow Copies... These are all default system items you can safely disable as long as you don't use them and know what you will be unable to do with them disabled...

But the pagefile is not one of them.
 
Why on Earth would I put a pagefile on a slow mechanical drive? The fact is, for my usage habits, my setup fits me perfectly. In two years, not a single problem doing things the I have, means more to me than you're sarcastic posting. Microsoft has to do things that will work on a wide range of hardware configurations, so what they set as default will not always be the best. Windows tends to be a bit too aggressive with paging, in my experience. Even when I was only using about 4GB of RAM, the computer was paging, which even on a SSD is noticeably slow. Shrinking my pagefile forces Windows to be more selective in what it pages, and for me, has an actual advantage, at least subjectively. I'm not saying that everyone should follow my lead, I'm just stating my opinion and why I believe it. It's up to other people to decide on what they want to do. I believe that there are people on this board that are under the opinion that everything Microsoft does is perfect, and any attempt to change things to suit you means you're an idiot. Any one knows that is a complete fallacy. No software, by anyone, fits everyone's needs out of the box.
You make some good points and for a very small selective group, modifying the pagefile can make sense. But for most users it should be one of the last things you mess with. If you decide to go with an SSD, you are accepting limited disk space. Sure for some heavy read/write programs there's a boost but a lot of people who are using SSD's are not gaining much from them, so really it's their own fault. Typical usage and games are not seeing huge gains that are worthy of the cost associated with SSD's.

Also, in Windows 7, the default Page File size is 30% smaller than than in Vista and previous. Microsoft is slowly moving away from page file but it's going to take time.

Yep, there's some stuff that's enabled by default that you can actually save space with.
Hibernation, System Restore, Shadow Copies... These are all default system items you can safely disable as long as you don't use them and know what you will be unable to do with them disabled...

But the pagefile is not one of them.
Nice...
 
I don't disable the page file. I always have one, but I almost always keep it on one of my storage drives and not the boot drive. An old habit that prolly nets me nothing with Vista or Win7. I am pretty sure it does not hurt me at least.
 
I don't disable the page file. I always have one, but I almost always keep it on one of my storage drives and not the boot drive. An old habit that prolly nets me nothing with Vista or Win7. I am pretty sure it does not hurt me at least.
You can actually get a good speed boost by moving it to another physical drive. Speed increases moving it to another partition on the SAME drive are usually just theoretical, and not noticible to the end-user as far as performance gains.

Also, in Windows 7, the default Page File size is 30% smaller than than in Vista and previous. Microsoft is slowly moving away from page file but it's going to take time.
I doubt that. Unless you have control over what application developers do, the OS has to be able to protect itself.
Linux, OS X, Solaris, they all use some form of pagefile.

That said, Microsoft might come up with a new method or approach to it, but the underlying function I don't see changing. Even if 100% of the world was on SSD, we'd still have a need for pagefiles.
 
The pagefile isn't just used for when an application allocated more RAM than it needs to. I'd suggest going and researching exactly what it is and what it does before making such ignorant statements.

Once you actually stop and think about this- there's an EVEN GREATER reason to have PageFiles on SSDs than there is on physical drives. Just remember-pagefile is more related to RAM than your disk. So if your system has 6GB of RAM and you move from HDD to SSD- nothing changes with your RAM. The disk changes. Since the disk is FASTER you'll actually have GREATER benefit with your paging file. Your amount of RAM is the same- IE, your need for a pagefile remains the same.

I get that, I want a page file on my SSD. But you're not taking other things into account. Lets say I have infinite ram, whats your answer than?

There's a problem with your replies. You're giving me search bar links without any of your explanations, you just end off your statements by calling me & people uninformed without informing us of anything. I don't think you know how the pagefile works your self.

When we take out crash dumps, I keep reading there's no purpose in having such a big page file. I'll read this and this and this and it's a ton of knowledge, and from that knowledge I can only make intellegent conclusions.

So I'll tell you TechieSooner, after all my reading, I must inform you that you don't know enough and I suggest you read the articles I've read and prove to me why I need the default page file size.

You can actually get a good speed boost by moving it to another physical drive. Speed increases moving it to another partition on the SAME drive are usually just theoretical, and not noticible to the end-user as far as performance gains.

After all your replies and knowing my SSD will be small, you actually say it's a good thing to put the pagefile on another drive... Again, I don't think you know what you're talking about.
 
I doubt that. Unless you have control over what application developers do, the OS has to be able to protect itself.
Linux, OS X, Solaris, they all use some form of pagefile.

That said, Microsoft might come up with a new method or approach to it, but the underlying function I don't see changing. Even if 100% of the world was on SSD, we'd still have a need for pagefiles.

Not a new method really. All they did was reduce the default initial size. As long as you don't change the settings Windows can still increase the size of the page file as needed.
 
I've never looked much into the pagefile myself, normally leaving it at the default setting and letting everything run it's course. I am curious as to one thing though, does Windows use the page file even if you never run out of physical memory space?

yes, generally idle stuff / minimized things will get stashed away.
 
That said, Microsoft might come up with a new method or approach to it, but the underlying function I don't see changing. Even if 100% of the world was on SSD, we'd still have a need for pagefiles.
Few quotes from Windows 7 Engineering blogs ...

26. Pagefile reduction

Through extensive use of Beta telemetry data, we have determined we can slim down the Windows disk footprint further by reducing the default page file size to be 100% of the available main memory. It used to be “Memory + 300MB” so on a 1GB RAM system there was an extra third allocated that is no longer required. The pagefile on some occasions will increase in size if required, but we just pre-allocate less.

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.

Will Superfetch be disabled on SSDs?

Yes, for most systems with SSDs.

If the system disk is an SSD, and the SSD performs adequately on random reads and doesn’t have glaring performance issues with random writes or flushes, then Superfetch, boot prefetching, application launch prefetching, ReadyBoost and ReadDrive will all be disabled.

Initially, we had configured all of these features to be off on all SSDs, but we encountered sizable performance regressions on some systems. In root causing those regressions, we found that some first generation SSDs had severe enough random write and flush problems that ultimately lead to disk reads being blocked for long periods of time. With Superfetch and other prefetching re-enabled, performance on key scenarios was markedly improved.
Sounds like if you have an old SSD you want Superfetch on.

Sources:
 
I get that, I want a page file on my SSD. But you're not taking other things into account. Lets say I have infinite ram, whats your answer than?
You won't need one if you had infinite RAM. However there's no such thing, so this is a redundant argument.
As RAM gets cheaper and becomes more common, the apps using the RAM will also grow. So I don't think we'll ever see anything close to "infinite" RAM.

There's a VERY VERY small minority of people that can manually screw with their pagefile and get away with it. Home use, is not one of them. You'll literally spend more time screwing around with pagefile settings and doing the nessesary monitoring of said pagefile than you'd ever recoup in speed.

So folks that actually benefit? Oddly enough the majority market on that would be server/enterprise users. It's because their systems run a precise and given set of applications that's closely monitored and tested before deployment. That's why in those kinds of environments you always know EXACTLY what you're dealing with and manually sizing a pagefile is possible. That said: it's never sizing it for performance reasons on another partition. It's usually sizing it for an additional disk in the array, so one knows how big of disk to order. And even once that's all taken into consideration, most SysAdmins want to "error-proof" everything as much as possible, so get this: they let Windows manage the size of the pagefile on the additional disk.

There's a problem with your replies. You're giving me search bar links without any of your explanations, you just end off your statements by calling me & people uninformed without informing us of anything. I don't think you know how the pagefile works your self.
Based on the context and the portion of your reply I quoted, I still stick by that you don't know how it works. You're saying you might have 6GB of RAM, so it'd never be used. And that's 100% wrong.

So I'll tell you TechieSooner, after all my reading, I must inform you that you don't know enough and I suggest you read the articles I've read and prove to me why I need the default page file size.
Same freaking reason I've stated from the beginning... If Application X bugs out and allocated 6GB of RAM, you only have 4GB of RAM installed- and since you're "Smater" than Microsoft and have a 400MB pagefile, what do you think will happen to that system, mmm???

It doesn't even have to be a malicious application to do that, either. Any application can (And has done) that, even legitimate ones. Applications bug out, almost everyone should know this.

After all your replies and knowing my SSD will be small, you actually say it's a good thing to put the pagefile on another drive... Again, I don't think you know what you're talking about.
Doesn't conflict with anything I've said at all. Again, if you knew how the pagefile actually worked- you'd know this.

I'll try to explain this in simple terms for you, OK?

Obviously as I've said before: Switching hard drives out does not change your need for a pagefile. Period. (And this in itself is why your whole argument is wrong anyway, because you're assuming it does).
Switching hard drives out simply changes the PERFORMANCE of said page file. HDDs are slow- the pagefile will run slower. SSDs are faster- the pagefile will run faster. So the benefit of the pagefile is increased on SSDs.
In both scenarios, regardless of what kind of disk you've got: pagefile performance will be better on a second disk- for the very same reasons a RAID10 is faster than a single disk. It's because there's a max speed of how much data can be read and written to any given drive. Have two drives- and you increase the overall speed.
 
You make some good points and for a very small selective group, modifying the pagefile can make sense. But for most users it should be one of the last things you mess with. If you decide to go with an SSD, you are accepting limited disk space. Sure for some heavy read/write programs there's a boost but a lot of people who are using SSD's are not gaining much from them, so really it's their own fault. Typical usage and games are not seeing huge gains that are worthy of the cost associated with SSD's.

I was only sharing with the OP what I found worked best for me. My modifying the pagefile really had nothing to do with the available free space on my SSD, since I have plenty. The only reason I messed with it was because I kept finding situations where it was paging excessively and it was having a negative effect. Where I did mess up with my post was where it came across as a general recommendation for every user.
As for SSDs not showing a big difference for most of the users, that's not true. I was a big skeptic of all the hype surrounding SSDs, especially the claim that it was about as big of a leap as going from 2GB to 4GB of RAM. But, I was wrong. Even in just normal using of the system, everything is much quicker when it comes to general task. It's hard to explain though, but everyone I've talked to who has used a computer with a SSD has agreed. I do agree about the claim about games, you don't notice a difference unless you specifically try and find situations to take advantage of the drive.
 
I was only sharing with the OP what I found worked best for me. My modifying the pagefile really had nothing to do with the available free space on my SSD, since I have plenty. The only reason I messed with it was because I kept finding situations where it was paging excessively and it was having a negative effect. Where I did mess up with my post was where it came across as a general recommendation for every user.
Fair enough, that's my beef with this stuff. Obviously I can care less what you do on your system, but taken as recommendations for other users is when I have my issue (there's lots of lurkers that never post).


As for SSDs not showing a big difference for most of the users, that's not true. I was a big skeptic of all the hype surrounding SSDs, especially the claim that it was about as big of a leap as going from 2GB to 4GB of RAM. But, I was wrong. Even in just normal using of the system, everything is much quicker when it comes to general task.
Yes for the most part.
Obviously, a SSD will just improve times when it's got to access something on a disk.
The example of gamers... Gamers have a crapload of RAM- and with Superfetch doing its thing, and with gamers spending money on a good amount of RAM- they aren't going to be loading much off the hard disk. SSDs have a huge advantage in bootup time as well. What with SSDs and the bootup technology Microsoft is packing in- we aren't far from instant-on systems.

It really just depends how you use your system how much benefit you'll see from a SSD, but in general: yes- you'll notice the difference.
 
As for SSDs not showing a big difference for most of the users, that's not true. I was a big skeptic of all the hype surrounding SSDs, especially the claim that it was about as big of a leap as going from 2GB to 4GB of RAM. But, I was wrong. Even in just normal using of the system, everything is much quicker when it comes to general task. It's hard to explain though, but everyone I've talked to who has used a computer with a SSD has agreed. I do agree about the claim about games, you don't notice a difference unless you specifically try and find situations to take advantage of the drive.
This could also be contributed to coming from a slow hard drive. Would people still feel that they are 'much faster' going from an already fast HDD to an SSD? Some of the newer HDD's are pushing 70-100MBs average. I can't see how most programs or the OS in general use that much bandwidth regularly. Sure, booting might be a little faster off an SSD but I don't recommend basing hardware decisions off boot speed.

I suppose possibly the quick seek time of an SSD might help in opening small documents or small files that your OS needs but personally I couldn't sacrifice hundreds of GB of storage for a fraction of a second faster load times. Even if I did have an SSD for my root drive, I'd still need an HDD for programs/user files which would be counter productive because all of my important data would be on a mechanical drive. SSD's just seem absolutely a non-viable solution for anyone who has high storage requirements
 
^^^ That's why SSDs are great for your OS and Applications, but data is perfectly fine on a traditional disk.
With notebooks- usually you're limited to either/or.
 
SSDs were the last key to the puzzle. I'm a very impatient man when it comes to computers, and to have the only thing slowing the responsiveness of a PC down being the physical storage medium, was very irritating :p SSDs have finally relieved me of that itch :)
 
I wholeheartedly agree... It's the #1 bottleneck of performance in any computer. Now we've just got to wait for them to come down in price (Over $2/GB... Rather pricey).

Stick 10 1TB SSDs in a RAID10.... Droooolllll Be crazy fast :D
 
This could also be contributed to coming from a slow hard drive. Would people still feel that they are 'much faster' going from an already fast HDD to an SSD? Some of the newer HDD's are pushing 70-100MBs average. I can't see how most programs or the OS in general use that much bandwidth regularly. Sure, booting might be a little faster off an SSD but I don't recommend basing hardware decisions off boot speed.

I suppose possibly the quick seek time of an SSD might help in opening small documents or small files that your OS needs but personally I couldn't sacrifice hundreds of GB of storage for a fraction of a second faster load times. Even if I did have an SSD for my root drive, I'd still need an HDD for programs/user files which would be counter productive because all of my important data would be on a mechanical drive. SSD's just seem absolutely a non-viable solution for anyone who has high storage requirements

Considering I came from a VelociRaptor, that's not what why I noticed such a large difference. And yes, the seek time is the whole reason. Considering much of data being both written and read from disk are small files, it makes sense. A SSD can read a 4K file at around 20MB/s and write around 10MB/s, while even the VelociRaptor is limited to under a MB/s. As for your aversion to using multiple drives, I don't really understand. Media and things like downloads, word documents, pictures, and such don't require a fast drive. Even before people started using SSDs, multiple drives was the standard set-up, at least with the people here. Very few people ever used a single large drive. But, to each their own. Once you finally do go with a SSD, you'll see why people preach about the benefits.
 
I have an OCZ Apex, I originally had it on my laptop with windows vista and after following all the tweak guides on the OCZ forums I still found the performance to be horrible, completely unusable in fact.

I ended up getting a WD 320GB 7200rpm drive for my laptop and decided that an SSD would be perfect for my HTPC, at this point Win 7 had just come out on technet so I went ahead an installed it on my HTPC with the Apex, I'm now using it with Win 7 ultimate x64 with no tweaks what so ever, and I find it to be pretty damn fast, I'm actually quite surprised how well it runs.

I would say leave Win 7 to do it's thing.
 
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