Swap file on ssd at the discretion of the system. What to manually disable and what not

Today, if not all PC users, then most of them for sure, managed to find out about what SSDs are good at. At a relatively inexpensive cost, they are several times superior to conventional HDD disks, often simultaneously in several parameters, including, for example, the amount of available memory, the efficiency of tasks, and the recording speed. However, the more popular such drives become, the more controversy arises about their optimization. In particular, the question is still relevant whether it is necessary to disable the paging file on the SSD drive or not.

Well, let's try to answer it as carefully as possible, without missing out on a single argument in favor or against this option for optimizing a removable hard drive.

Turning off the paging file is a way to extend the life of an SSD

Listening to the opinion of supporters of disabling the paging file for the SSD-drive on the computer, one cannot help but notice that their main argument boils down to the desire to extend the life of their removable hard drive. Whatever one may say, but this argument has its own background. So, the practice of using SSD-disks has shown that their service life directly depends on what kind of load they have.

It is determined as a whole by the number of rewrites, which roughly fluctuates around 10,000. What does this mean? The fact that with active use of an SSD drive on a computer, you should not expect high performance from it. Over time it functionality are depleted, leading removable hard disc is unusable.

The question arises, is it possible to increase its lifespan without disabling the paging file? Oddly enough, but the answer to it with full confidence is to be given in the affirmative. The point is that the term SSD services determined by many factors, including:

• defragmentation process;
• the load of the removable hard disk;
• SSD customization;
• shutdown TRIM commands;
• disk indexing;
• debug hibernation.

Thus, we will not be able to extend the life of the SSD only by disabling the paging file on the computer.

Disable paging file - path to expand disk space

The second point that catches your eye when considering the arguments for disabling the swap file on a computer with an SSD is related to the ability to speed up the operation of the operating system in this way. This is explained by the fact that by removing it from a removable hard drive, you can free up a couple of gigabytes of free space. A plus? Yes, everything seems to be correct. Saving resources, increasing performance, improving the performance of programs is obvious.

What's the catch? The fact that several released gigabytes of a special role for optimization SSD work will not play. In this case, it will be easier to format the disk before putting it on the computer, and then periodically clean the drive in the future from non-working programs and applications.

Disabling swap file on SSD leads to RAM issues

Today, the main argument against disabling the paging file for a removable hard disk is that this setting of an SSD disk on a computer leads to serious malfunctions of the operating system. This is explained by the fact that many computer programs to ensure full-fledged operation without interruptions, they reserve themselves in a sufficiently large amount extra space in system. The problem is that it is very difficult to see such changes in RAM, since data about them is not displayed in the task manager.

As a result, if the computer has a working swap file, the program will use the space allocated for it on the disk without harming the system at all. However, if for any reason it turns out to be disabled, the reservation of space for these programs will occur directly in the random access memory... Another problem is that it is almost impossible to know in advance how much space is required for additional software.

What does it mean? The fact that without the presence of a paging file on the computer, there is a high probability that installed programs will significantly reduce the amount of available RAM, thus leading to slowdowns and malfunctions of the PC.

Ways to solve the problem

In general, analyzing the arguments of supporters and opponents of shutdown on a computer using SSD file swap, you can come to the conclusion that using this method to optimize the operation of a removable hard drive is highly undesirable. How to be? Use one of the options for solving such a problem.

Method number 1: Optimizing virtual memory using Windows

In order to configure the paging file on a Windows computer manually, first right-click on the "Computer" shortcut on the desktop and select "Properties" from the menu that appears:

Now, in the new system window, go to the "Performance" section and press the "Parameters" button:

After that, in the "Performance Settings" window that appears, open the "Advanced" tab and click the "Change" button opposite the " Virtual memory»:

Now we uncheck the box "Automatically select ...", mark the required disk, specify the desired paging file size for it, and press the "Set" button:

As a result, thanks to this method, you can independently reduce the size of the paging file (if its size seems overstated to you), and, conversely, increase it.

Method number 2: Setting by means of special software

To configure the normal operation of the paging file, you can use special programs SSD optimizations such as SSD Mini Tweaker, SSD Fresh, or SSD Tweaker. To do this, it will be enough to put one of them on the computer and use it to set the required value for virtual memory.

In addition, with the help of such programs, you can disable the function Windows indexing, protect the system, exit hibernation, stop the defragmentation process, enable Trim, increase the cache size, perform other settings to optimize the system from the SSD drive.

By using the paging file, the operating Windows system 10 can expand the amount of RAM. In cases where the operating volume runs out, Windows creates a special file on the hard disk, where parts of programs and data files are uploaded. With the development of storage devices, all more users are wondering if this very swap file is needed on the SSD.

So, today we will try to answer the question of many owners solid state drives.

Should you use a swap file at all?

As mentioned above, the paging file is created by the system automatically when there is a lack of RAM. This is especially true if the system has less than 4 gigabytes. Therefore, it is necessary to decide whether a paging file is needed or not based on the amount of RAM. If your computer has 8 or more gigabytes of RAM, then you can safely disable the paging file. This will not only speed up the operation of the operating system as a whole, but also extend the life of the disk. Otherwise (if your system uses less than 8 gigabytes of RAM) it is better to use swap, it does not matter what kind of storage medium you use.

Page file management

In order to enable or disable the paging file, you must do the following:

Now we hit the window where you can manage the paging file. In order to disable it, uncheck the box "Automatically select paging file size" and move the switch to position "Without swap file"... Also, here you can select the disk that will create the file and set its size manually.

When a paging file is needed on an SSD

There may be a situation when both types of disks (HDD and SSD) are used in the system and you cannot do without a paging file. Then it is advisable to transfer it to a solid state drive, since the read / write speed on it is much higher. Which, in turn, will have a positive effect on the speed of the system. Consider another case, you have a computer with 4 gigabytes of RAM (or less) and an SSD on which the system is installed. In this case operating system itself will create a swap file and it is better not to disable it. If you have a small disk (up to 128 GB), then you can reduce the size of the file (where it can be done, described in the instructions "Swap File Management" above).

Conclusion

So, as we can see, the use of the paging file depends on the amount of RAM. However, if your computer cannot run without a paging file and you have a solid state drive installed, then it is best to transfer paging to it.

The paging file is required when there is a lack of RAM. If you have enough RAM, then the paging file is almost never used, and SSD lifespan it will not be reflected in any way. Although many users still turn off swap. This is where heaps of errors begin to appear, due to the suboptimal operating mode of the dispatcher Windows memory... need before you are going. Insofar as RAM speeds up work windows much stronger than a fast drive and provides a more tangible performance boost than buying an SSD.

Second option, transfer swap file On the second HDD HDD, but here it turns out the following: if the memory is no longer enough, then pagefile.sys is processed on the HDD hard disk several times slower than on the SSD! Therefore, there can be no talk of an increase in productivity.

Do I need to place the paging file on the SSD?

The answer is definitely Yes! Since the main operations with the paging file are random writing of small amounts or sequential writing of large amounts of data. Both types of operations perform well on SSD drives... By analyzing the statistics for writing and reading the paging file, we found that:

• reading from the paging file more often than writing to pagefile.sys at a 40: 1 ratio, recall that reading from a solid state drive does not in any way affect its wear
• paging file reads are typically very small, 67% less than or equal to 4KB and 88% less than 16KB
• the paging blocks pagefile.sys are quite large, 62% of them are greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% are almost exactly 1 MB

Typical paging file use cases and SSD performance specs go well together, and this particular file is strongly it is recommended to place on an SSD drive.

But desire by any means extend the life of an SSD indestructible. Everyone is starting to transfer pagefile.sys to hard drives, or even turn it off altogether, although even the naked eye can see that this reduces the speed of the computer. A complete shutdown paging file does not allow to fully run resource-intensive programs and diagnose critical errors.

How do I create a swap file on an SSD?

1. Right-click on the Computer icon.
2. Select Properties.
3. Select " Extra options systems ".
4. Go to the "Advanced" tab and click on the "Options" button in the "Performance" section.
5. The Performance Options window appears. In it you need to select the "Advanced" tab and in the "Virtual memory" section click on the "Change" button.
6. The Virtual Memory dialog box appears. In it, you need to tick off the "Automatically select paging file size" option, or set a fixed paging volume.
7. Press the button "Set".
8. Click OK to save the changes and restart your computer.

Good day.

Arguments against the paging file

Is this your first time hearing about a debate on this issue? Or do you know nothing about paging files at all? I have already written separate articles about what they are, so I will not repeat myself, but just in a nutshell I will introduce you to the course.

So, the swap file - aka swap file is used in those situations when there is not enough RAM. And this shortage is filled with a piece of memory system disk(SSD either). Temporary files or parts of heavy programs are uploaded to it. Hence, it is often overwritten.

What effect does this have on STOs? These discs have a limited number of rewriting cycles. This leads users to the idea that if you do not disable the swap file, the drive will use up its resource faster.

The next argument in favor of disabling the subject of contention is freeing up space on the SSD, which will increase its performance.

Are these arguments valid in practice? Let's figure it out.

Does it make sense to disconnect?

On the forums, I have often come across the opinion that SSDs allow overwriting so many times that the included pagefile.sys can not significantly reduce the life of the device. As for the second argument, disabling paging frees up several gigabytes of memory, which will also not significantly affect disk performance.

It seems that the arguments of both one and other users are not devoid of meaning. So where to find the truth?

Most experts are still inclined to believe that you should not give up the paging file, but only when the RAM is only 4 GB or less.

Otherwise, there will be a very large load on memory and the computer will start to slow down.

Also without of this file not to do with the presence of both HDD (system) and SSD (as an additional one). In such a situation, it is recommended to transfer it to a solid state drive, because the speed of its read and write operations is higher than that of hard disk... This means that the overall computer will run faster.

We compromise

Can't decide which camp to join? If you have a drive up to 128GB, you can compromise and just do a little optimization by reducing the paging file size.

Thus, it will help in cases where there is little RAM, and at the same time it will not take up much space.

But personally, for example, I turned it off completely and I don't feel any problems. My SSD is 120 gigabytes, and I have 6 gigs of memory (RAM) in total, and everything works fine. Yes, the place was vacated, of course, and that's great. Sometimes I run such heavy things as Photoshop and Adobe Premiere, there were no errors.

In short, the conclusion is this: if you have 4 gig of RAM, then you can turn it off and look at the stability of the system, if there are failures, then return everything as it was. If there is more memory, then it is natural to turn off everything and do not steam like me :).

That's all.

Glad that you dropped by to see me.

Until next time on the pages of my blog!

So you've got a brand new SSD. You installed the system on it, armed yourself with the optimization guide found on the net and after a couple of hours did everything possible to ... slow down your work in the system!

Don't believe me? Think about what makes high performance.
You can experience the benefits of SSD speed in three categories:

• the system, for example, the speed of its loading and operation
• programs, including web surfing and working with documents, images and media files
• your actions, including navigating the disk and copying / moving files

How myths are born

I'm pretty sure your SSD tweaks have negatively affected at least one of these components. Below you will find out why this happened, but first about the reasons for this optimization.

If you read the inscription "buffalo" on an elephant's cage ...

There are tons of guides and even tweakers online for optimizing your SSD. In fact, the same information is used everywhere, and:

• obsolete because it aims to save disk space and reduce the number of rewrite cycles, which is irrelevant for modern SSDs in home PCs
• useless, because Windows itself takes care of what they suggest to configure
• harmful, because it leads to a decrease in the speed of work - yours, programs and systems

Take a critical look at your guide or tweaker and consider which items fall into one of these categories!

There is one more problem - unsuccessful presentation of information, including incorrectly placed accents.

Windows 7 will disable defragmentation for SSD drives. Since SSDs perform excellently on random reads, defragmentation will not provide the same benefits as on a regular disk.

If you don't believe the developers, take a look at the event log. You will not find records of defragmentation of the SSD volume there.

Thus, when the SSD is the only drive, the scheduled task simply does not run. And when the PC also has an HDD, disabling the task or the scheduler deprives the hard drive of worthy optimization by a regular defragmenter.

Windows 8

In Windows 8, the Disk Optimizer has taken the place of the defragmenter!

Optimization hard drives, as before, comes down to defragmentation. Solid state drives Windows more does not ignore, but helps them by sending a set of TRIM commands to the controller for the entire volume. This happens on a schedule as part of automatic maintenance, i.e. when you are not working on a PC.

Depending on the SSD controller, garbage collection can be performed immediately upon receipt of the TRIM command, or delayed until a period of inactivity. Disabling Disk Optimizer or Job Scheduler degrades drive performance.

3. Disable or move the paging file

This tip: useless or harmful, slows down the system speed when there is insufficient memory

The hardware configuration must be balanced. If you have little memory installed, you should add it first, because it is cheaper and provides a more tangible performance increase than buying an SSD.

When you have enough memory, the paging file is hardly used, i.e. this will not affect the lifespan of the disk. But many people still turn off the pumping - they say, let the system keep everything in memory, I said! As a result, Windows Memory Manager is not performing at its best.

As a last resort, the paging file is transferred to the hard drive. But if suddenly there is not enough memory, you will only benefit in performance if you have pagefile.sys on the SSD!

6. Disable Windows Search and / or Disk Indexing

This tip: useless, reduces the speed of your work

This is sometimes argued that SSDs are so fast that the index will not significantly speed up searches. These people just never really used the present. Windows search!

I think it's pointless to deprive yourself of useful tool that speeds up your daily tasks.

Nothing prevents you from moving the index to another disk! But if you still have not made friends with Windows search and do not have the slightest desire to master it, then yes, you can turn off indexing. However, if you also have all your personal files transferred

7. Transfer custom folders to another disk

This tip: harmful, reduces the speed of programs and your actions

Imagine that you have copied 420 photos from a memory card to disk and you want to quickly see their thumbnails. You liked everything, and now you decided to massively scale down these photos to 75%.

With which disk, HDD or SSD, will it be faster to create thumbnails of photos and read their metadata? What about reading all files and writing their thumbnails?

SSDs outperform hard drives for navigation, file operations, and programs. Of course, the difference in speed between HDD and SSD is not noticeable in all cases. But you believed that it was when you bought a solid-state drive :) Why then don't you take advantage of its advantages?

Returning to the search, in the absence of an index (and even a third-party one), everything depends on the speed of reading from the disk. If all of your personal files have been migrated from SSD to HDD, that means ... you guessed it?

8. Installing programs on another disk

This tip: harmful, slows down the launch speed of programs

After installing the system on a solid state drive, the speed immediately catches the eye Windows boot and launch programs. However, some people do not really see the second, because they keep the programs on another disk. The main argument is portability - they say, after reinstallation Windows programs work immediately. In principle, large packages will still not work correctly after reinstallation, but that's not even the point.

You just need to learn how to configure Windows so that you reinstall it as rarely as possible. You can also configure the creation of incremental copies of the system partition Windows tools or third-party programs.

And then your programs will always run as quickly as possible from the solid state drive! The speed of their work depends on where the program data is located. However, the most thorough "optimizers" do not forget to transfer them to the HDD ...

9. Transferring the AppData and ProgramData folders to another drive

This tip: harmful, reduces the speed of programs

Modern programs no longer store files in their folders. I have already explained the purpose of the folders ProgramData and AppData... The second folder is more interesting because it stores data that programs work with all the time.

Moving these folders from a high-speed disk to a slow one, you slow down the performance of programs. I'll give you one simple example below.

10. Transferring the browser cache to another disk

This tip: harmful, reduces browser speed

This is a special case of transfer AppData folders... Do you think the browser will write data to the cache and read it from there faster when placing the cache on an SSD or HDD? You could find out the answer at the beginning of the article, following my advice to measure the read and write speeds of your disks.

Have you bought an SSD to make everything run faster? Then keep your browser cache on SSD!

11. Transferring temporary files to another disk

This tip: harmful, reduces the speed of installation and operation of programs

The system and programs create temporary files on the fly. The simplest example- program installation. Look at the picture and tell me what is happening now!

The Firefox installer unpacks the package contents to a temporary folder, and then starts the installation of the program from there. In other words, it first writes to disk, and then reads the unpacked files and writes them to another folder.

I still have the same question - will the installation be faster if the temporary files are located on a solid-state drive or hard drive?

This question also applies to the case when the program uses temporary files in the course of its work.

The easiest way to control the size of temporary folders is by cleaning them on a schedule. Thus, the advice on transferring temporary files is worth heeding unless you have programs that tend to regularly write tens of gigabytes of files to a temporary folder.

12. Using ancient registry tweaks

The four tweaks listed below are included in standard set measures for Windows optimization and not only for solid state drives. In popular mythology, they are recommended to be set to 1.

Let's see if tweaks speed up anything.

NtfsDisableLastAccessUpdate

A decade ago, Microsoft actually recommended disabling the NTFS attribute, which stores the last time a file or folder was accessed. But even then, this advice was aimed at server configurations in which a large number of folders and files are accessed in a short period of time (file servers serve good example). There is simply no such load on client systems.

NtfsDisable8dot3NameCreation

In theory, disabling MS-DOS names (8.3) can improve the speed of opening file folders. In reality, this does not happen on solid-state drives.

DisablePagingExecutive

This parameter controls whether Windows is allowed to swap drivers and system code kernel mode. Allegedly, on the one hand, the prohibition reduces the amount of writes to the disk, and on the other hand, it increases network performance on systems with big amount memory.

In practice, the first is irrelevant for modern SSDs, and the second does not bring significant dividends on them. And with a small amount of RAM, such "optimization" can lead to unstable system operation.

LargeSystemCache

In Windows XP, increasing the cache size file system could be set in the performance settings. Even a quick glance at the picture suggests that the mode intended for server systems reduces the performance of programs.

Microsoft has put a rake in KB895392, removed the ability to customize from graphical interface the next OS, but this does not stop the "optimizers" to this day.

By using a tweak, you reduce the performance of programs because the priority of the memory manager is shifted from processes to the system working set.

The result of using tweaks

The first three tweaks were aimed at use in server systems of the times Windows Server 2003. And at the beginning of the MSDN articles (,) it is said that in Windows Server 2008, tests did not reveal a significant increase in performance after applying these and other optimization measures given there.

In other words, even if it was at least somehow relevant to performance in the days of XP, it doesn't matter since Vista. And from the point of view of the volume of writing to disk, a penny is saved compared to the rest of the system and user activity.

Thus, the use of the first three tweaks, while not harmful, does not in any way increase the system performance and the lifespan of the solid state drive. The fourth tweak slows down the work of programs.

conclusions

I've covered 12 popular SSD optimization tips. In reality, none of them improve performance. To speed up work, they are at least useless, and often harmful.

Applying mythical optimization, you only reduce the overall speed of work, which is the sum of the speed of your daily activities, the responsiveness of programs and the overall performance of Windows.

If you just install Windows on an SSD and use it the way Microsoft intended, that speed will be faster than after all these optimization measures. Agree that you don't need to be an expert to see the negative effect of most of these myths.

I think that almost all the optimization methods that you use, judging by the comments, have fallen under the microscope. Only advice remained behind the scenes, which already coincide with standard settings Windows (like enabling TRIM and disk write caching).