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    Pagefile on ExpressCard SSD

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by stewie, Jan 18, 2009.

  1. stewie

    stewie What the deuce?

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    Has anyone tried or successfully put their pagefile.sys on an ExpressCard SSD? If yes, notice any improvement?

    OS: XP, Vista x86 or x64.

    Thanks.
     
    stewie, Jan 18, 2009
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  2. AuroraAlpha

    AuroraAlpha Notebook Consultant

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    Intresting you mention this because I've been thinking about it the last two days.

    The biggest problem I see is that the expresscard SSDs are all VERY slow, and at best would be limited by USB2.0. That would mean a 40MB/s limit, though testing shows that they get 20MB/s read and 7MB/s write at best to 4.5MB/s read and 2MB/s write at worst. I was thinking that two of them in RAID 0 would give 8-64GB drives with hopefully 40MB/s read and 14MB/s write. These numbers arn't terrible, but for the $40-$65-$102-$300 it would cost for the sizes respectivly, its expensive if you have ANY other option.

    Also on Vista x64 when I just put a flash card into the built in cardreader, I get no option to use it for the pagefile, so I'm not sure if express cards would work. My guess is that the flash drive is a dynamic disk and page files arn't allowed to use dynamic disks (but thats a guess).

    Anyways, if anyone has any ideas I'm very, VERY intrested to hear what you have to say as well as prices are dropping and the therotetical battery life and space gains arn't bad.
     
    AuroraAlpha, Jan 18, 2009
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  3. stewie

    stewie What the deuce?

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    Yeah, the speed of ExpressCard SSD is my main concern as well. But I was thinking, since it is still a separate drive, then maybe it will be ok even though the read/write speed are a bit slower.

    For it to work, from what I read, I believe you have to replace the driver file to make Windows think that it is a non-removable drive.
     
    stewie, Jan 18, 2009
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  4. Big Mike

    Big Mike Notebook Deity

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    I'd say the abysmal performance of current expresscard SSDs is prohibitive to using them for much of anything. If you could get a mini-pcie disk running like the ones used in many netbooks that'd probably be a much more viable option. Expresscard SSDs out now get blown away by mechanical disks despite their low access time, since the page file's location is fixed, and generally pretty early on the drive aside from the brief access latency it should move things a long pretty decently.
     
    Big Mike, Jan 18, 2009
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  5. stewie

    stewie What the deuce?

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    Thanks for the info, Big Mike. Until faster ExpressCard SSDs become available, maybe upgrading the main HDD to a faster one would be a smarter choice.
     
    stewie, Jan 18, 2009
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  6. Big Mike

    Big Mike Notebook Deity

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    Upgrading your ram if you have room to upgrade further will also reduce your dependency on a page file, but I'd imagine you've already done that.
     
    Big Mike, Jan 18, 2009
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  7. stewie

    stewie What the deuce?

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    Yeah, RAM is @ 4 GB atm. :D

    But no matter how much RAM you have, pagefile is still needed though.
     
    stewie, Jan 18, 2009
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  8. AuroraAlpha

    AuroraAlpha Notebook Consultant

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    With the lexars at least the access times are even worse then the transfer speed. Many reviews hit ~50ms compared with only 10-20ms for a 2.5" hardrive.

    The only reassuring thing is that a few computer models can get 30MB/s read and write with the lexar disks with very low latency. I have no idea why these handleful of models are faster (I'm guessing they use the PCI connection rather than the USB2.0), but it would be enough to get a great disk of of a RAIDed set. 60MB/s read and write, low latency, and 32-64GB isn't a bad deal for the $100 or so.

    Hmmm. Which driver gets replaced?

    You can run without a pagefile. I used XP with 2GB for several months without one, but then added it to a second harddrive again.

    XP with 2GB or more doesn't need one.
    Vista with 4GB or more doesn't need one (for most people).

    The problem is that if you system crashes, it doesn't record it unless your pagefile is at least 256MB. So to me it would seem that having a slightly bigger file, perhaps 384MB would be optimal. The problem is that no one sells drives that are both fast and small in size. If someone had some intel turbo memory and could set the pagefile to use it, that would seem the best option to me for Vista.
     
    AuroraAlpha, Jan 18, 2009
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  9. stewie

    stewie What the deuce?

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    stewie, Jan 18, 2009
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