SSD Pagefile

**Prexaspes** · May 1st, 2011, 03:57 AM

I recently bought 2 Kingston 16GB S100 solid state drives to use in my XP Pro desktop with intentions to use them in a RAID 0 stripe. I use the system mainly to rip DVDs, HD-DVDs and Blu-Rays and convert them with RipBot for my NAS and Ipad.

My original idea was to use it to rip to, then as the working disk for RipBot.

I have an Asrock 4CoreDual Sata2 R2.0 with a QX6800 and 2GB DDR 2 RAM. The primary drive is a RAID 3 array on an old PCI PNY NetCell raid card. 3 1TB Western Digital Green Drives occupy 3 of it's five slots. At first I was thinking to put two SSDs on the two remaining ports, but I think it would limit the throughput of the SSDs if for nothing else besides it being on the PCI bus. The RAID card would have to split itself between the arrays.

Now I'm thinking to put the two SSDs on the onboard RAID since it's SATA 2 and stripe them there. I'm sure it will use some extra CPU cycles, but probably not enough to make a big difference.

In this setup, I think I want to move the XP pagefile to the SSD array, as well as use it to rip to and process the video files. I will have the final RipBot output write to the main array, since neither the first or second pass are likely to exceed the write speed of the disk. Maybe that will change if GPU transcoding ever achieves consistently high quality.

I already have Diskeeper 2011, and will probably get the hyperfast addon since XP doesn't manage SSDs effectively, or so I read.

Let me know if I'm way off here.

**Aaron_8015** · May 1st, 2011, 07:39 AM

Sounds to be pretty much a waste of money.... You will kill those drives off really quickly writing lots of large files to them and having a pagefile. Not to mention in RAID they will have no TRIM support.

The best use of SSD's is loading apps, they benefit from a fast access time over HDD's but cheap drives suffer low write speeds. Most 7200RPM drives get faster Write speeds than the 75MB/s that drive gets.

you would see better results with a 2 hard drive raid0.. Faster write speeds and much longer life span.

**Prexaspes** · May 1st, 2011, 08:43 AM

I was planning on using them in a RAID 0. And I won't have TRIM support anyway, because I'm using Windows XP.

I hope that SSDs have developed into technology that won't die fast just because I used it as a scratch disk. If they can't handle normal disk use, why are they being sold?

**Aaron_8015** · May 1st, 2011, 08:48 AM

Missed the XP part...

TBH... SSD's still have a long way to go before I jump on the bandwagon... At this stage, the limited life cycle is too costly.... Even in raid, for the amount of data you will be writing, a hard drive Raid0 config will be faster, last longer, not to mention cheaper.

**Prexaspes** · May 3rd, 2011, 09:41 AM

Well, Microsoft says SSDs are good for pagefiles. I'm not that worried about burning them up before they're useful. About $100 for it. After I get the drives installed, I'll do a couple of tests and see if anything feels faster. Kingston claims about a million hours MTBF.

I didn't see anything like the old DDR populated hard drives. That would have been my first choice. They need one that can use the pile of old RAM I have stacked in my parts pile.

**Prexaspes** · January 29th, 2012, 11:13 PM

The drive is still blazing fast as a swap file drive. One drive is the os drive, the other is the swap file. I'll write back in a year or so and let you know if they ever became problematic.