I have been following the rise and progress of SSD's like everyone else, and yes like everyone else I want one BAD! but just like MOST everyone else Im not loaded with cash and so im forced to wait and hope they get cheaper and cheaper. Good news is they seem to be doing just that. All the info about SSD's seems to point to the perfect HDD replacement except the one achilles heel type problem; and that is the way Windows uses a small section of our drives as virtual memory and tends to thrash that area somewhat badly, those sectors of the disc are worn out by this process leading eventually to earlier failure On a cheaper HDD its not an issue but the expensive SSD's more finite lifespan of sectors mean it has become an issue. There are firmware updates that try to automatically change the address windows uses for virtual memory and so spread out the wear and tear or you can manually change it yourself every now and then by assigning a new area for it to use but lets face it we dont want to have to do this if it can be avoided. Recently CPC has suggested keeping an old blank HDD with your SSD in oder to use that for the caching,reading/writing of windows virtual memory and this seems a cool and cheap solution until you realise it kind of defeats some of the reasons we want the SSD in the first place. i.e: More durable SSD's can take more G's if knocked or dropped SSD's use far less energy and therefore improve battery life on laptops/notebooks SSD's are silent, no moving parts. finally the main reason, speed increases the SSD's afford us. A problem with the dual drive setup is, load times are extented due to the HDD still having to be spooled up or down to access data on it so the SSD would end up waiting for the data from the HDD to be accessed. I wanted to ask if it was possible to replace the HDD with a usb memory stick or pendrive so that you have: Win7 OS running on a 128GB SSD + 16GB USB2.2 PENDRIVE used as a swap file for virtual memory would it be quick enough for the task? does windows even allow virtual memory to be put onto a pendrive? If it could be done then you have a cheap almost throw away £17 16GB pendrive for a fall-guy for your glorious SSD and it is just as tough and silent! have i figured out a solution here? if not then how about a 16GB SSD for £39 as sold by OCZ. At least you could replace it without the need to lose data from a failed larger more expensive SSD? just a thought but who knows maybe im onto something here? the only problem would be pendrives limited USB 2 speed, something the 16GB OCZ SSD wouldnt have.
As long as Windows recognizes it as a separate non-optical drive, yes, you can move the pagefile onto whichever drive you want. I'd be a little concerned about transfer speeds, as USB 2.0 kind of sucks these days, but I suppose it probably couldn't be any worse than your average low-capacity hard drive. Don't get a 'throwaway SSD' for use as a pagefile drive, though. Keep in mind that the cheap ones all have the J-Micron 602 controllers in them, which means they have that stuttering issue. That's the last thing you want in a pagefile drive, really. If it were me and I wanted to spend more than a USB stick's worth for something to store the pagefile on, honestly, what I'd do is just fill up my RAM banks and disable the pagefile entirely. As long as you have 8GB or more of RAM, you can almost certainly pull that off. - Diosjenin -
This. I run 6GB RAM, and have turned my pagefile off. not because I have an SSD, just because it then forces windows to use all the RAM. The only time I Ever get close to using it all is running a virtual machine and playing a memory-heavy game. Even then I have nearly a GB free.
