SSD and RAM drive (is it worth it?)

I am interested in upgrading my current laptop with a 128GB SSD Crucial M4 or Intel 510. My line of thinking is to help extend the life of the SSD and increase performance I should create a 2GB RAM drive, set windows environment variables/page file/temp/downloads/cookies etc. to it.

I understand that the page file is needed when all available system RAM is used, however, some programs still require a page file. My plans are to set a 512MB page file in case this was to occur.

I would like to get the opinions of those who know more about this.

1. Is this practical and worth doing?
2. If so, best RAMdisk / RAMdrive software for Win7 Home Premium 64x?
3. What files/directories SHOULD be moved to the RAM drive?
4. How do I go about doing this?

Thanks for your help in advance!

 

stop it right now.

don't bother about the life of your ssd. it will last for years, maybe decades. it is MADE for this job. so let it do it.


just leave your system EXACTLY AS IT IS. THAT'S WHAT IT IS DESIGNED FOR.

if you want to do it for fun and learning, do it. if you want to do it for anything else (performance, ssd life, optimisation, tuning, what ever you wanna call it), forget it. it's useless. completely useless. the internet is full with such stupid guides that don't do a damn thing.

just don't. your ssd will be fine, serving you well, and life for years.

when it finally dies, assuming you still use it by then, you can replace it for some bucks anyways. ssds, by then, will be cheap and common.

if there are still sata disks out there at all by then.

just don't bother at all.

just don't.

 

No offence meant, but to be honest I was looking for a more technical explanation based off of actual credible references and verifiable facts as to weither or not a RAM drive could also increase performance, not just extend the life of the SSD drive (altho I STILL would like to know about that, talk statistics, a logical thinkers language). I NEVER assume any one person(s) cannot be wrong, EVER. MLC vs SLC? My system is a Custom Order, not understanding the "thats what it is designed for". You didn't touch on any of the other points of the original post...

Also am I mistaken for believing my system will probably not fully utilize 8GB of RAM in its current configuration? I will be using this system primarily for games/internet/ms office/and a little adobe photoshop. So there aren't any worth while benefits to a RAM drive then?

I mean to say that I do take your opinon in VERY HIGH consideration (based on your rep power/posts). I just have to understand why (it's my logical thinking/personality).

 

Also wondering about performance with a RAM drive as I have a SSD and 8 GB which aren't fully utilized most of the time.. don't really care so much about the lifetime of the SSD as it should be enough for me anyhow..

 

I wouldn't change the page file or use a RAM disk.

I would just configure Firefox to cache in RAM, much easier and less hassle.

I basically agree with davepermen, there's no need to extend the life of your SSD unless your an extreme user.

 

Performance

the most important thing to learn with ssds and ramdisks is the issue of the bottleneck.

if the disk-io is not the bottleneck of your experienced performance, then improving it does not matter.

say for example a cd player. it's a 1x cdrom, so it's VERY slow. it takes around 60-70 minutes to copy a cd with such a cdrom drive. but you know what? as long as it's used for playing music, that's exactly what you want: realtime playback. nothing more. nothing less.

is your browsers cache a notable performance bottleneck? i'm on my 13th ssd by now, and not on ONE ssd was the browser cache EVER a bottleneck. so moving to a ramdisk will not improve anything.

Wear and Tear
flash manufacturers know by now very well how long a flash chip lasts (minimum). those minimas can be combined by the amount of flash chips, the overhead of the controller when doing the wear leveling, and more. intel did that, and computed a lifetime for a typical intel gen1 80gb ssd of several decades.
they still went much lower with their guarantees, as they wanted to be on the safe side (and want people to buy stuff in the future. a perfect disk would never need replacement ever).

now any write affects the lifetime of an ssd. but to go with low numbers:

a 120gb ssd is in the system i'm on right now. so writing (assuming zero overhead right now) 120gb on it means every flash chip is written to ONCE.
now depending on the flash the minimum amount of supported writes is 3000, or 5000, or 10000, or 100000 (slc). assuming 5000 in my case, i can write 5000x120gb on it. that's 600tb of data. using the disk just as a webbrowser cache would mean you'd have to download 600tb worth of data into the cache (means no files, just webpages) to kill the ssd.

in my case, i have around 20Mbits/s. assuming fullspeed browsing (impossible, webpages are much slower most of the time), i would have around 2MBytes/s.

that would mean ~170GBytes in 1 day (assuming 24hours full browser usage). to kill the ssd i would have to fill 600000GB. that would mean around 3500 days. or 10 years.

now assuming you're not browsing every day 24h a day, but more like 8hours, then we talk about 30 years.

that would be the time it would take to kill a 120gb ssd with your internet cache if
- you could browse without any idle time (you'd have to click the next link while the page still loads)
- you would get 2MB/s from any webserver all the time

and that would just be the MINIMUM amount of writes the flash cells are certified for. they can last longer. much longer (in terms of intel up to 10x longer).

now real webbrowsing is much slower, so it's much less data (i guess /10 the bandwith, and about 10% of the actual browsing time you're actually clicking something), so you can already multiply by 100, resulting in around 3000 years.

i'm on this page, writing this now since minutes (and doing the math). so during those minutes, not one bit got written into my cache. most of the time spent on the web does NOT touch (write to) the cache.

i'm guessing currently that an ordinary web user would take around 20000 years to kill the ssd i'm using right now.

of course, those maths can be way off, but still the numbers are so massive, that you should realize, it simply doesn't matter AT ALL.


Premature Optimisation
if you're a programmer, you learn that at some point: optimizing something that is not proven to be an issue at all is just useless, much work, and can actually be harmful.

two ways in witch the cache in ram can be harmful
- performance. if you don't write the cache on disk, every time you reboot, your web is slow, as it has to built the cache again

or

- ssd writes. if you do write the ramdisk on disk every reboot, you actually write some gigabytes per reboot. not just the "new stuff" in the cache. everything. that can actually account to MORE data being written than what you wanted to save in the first place.


so you will a) lose performance, and save some years out of the 100ts of years that the ssd would life or b) actually might do worse for the lifetime of it.


Conclusion
just leave it as is. the whole thing is very complicated to really optimize for. browser developers will take care of it (google chrome has to run on an 8gb very slow ssd in the future, and last for years on there, too, without killing the ssd (google chromebook)). all the knowledge from there will make sure your own ssd will NEVER have any trouble at all.



hope that gives some idea. math and science, it's your friend. you don't have to trust people. you can just verify it all yourself.

 

Outstanding reply, thank you for the clarification, repped. Am I understanding correctly that the purpose of TRIM is for wear leveling? That is also the reason RAID and TRIM will not currently work together?

I am convinced that a RAM drive is unnecessay, however, I do like the idea of downloads going to it for temp use and extraction prior to installation, and wiping itself on reboot. Are there any down sides to having a RAM drive for this purpose? With the exception of the RAM availability loss.

Also, if I get a small SSD what is the minimum you would recommend for the page file size?

 

If you have place for a second drive put your current HDD in that place.
You can use it for Backup and all other stuff that does not need the performance of a SSD(downloads etc).
I believe a SSD of 64 GB will do the job. As you have 8 GB RAM a pagefile size of 512 MB should be sufficient. You can allow to grow to maybe 2048 MB. I assume only Adobe Photoshop will force the maximum pagefile size.
With a small SSD I also advice to disable hibernate as this will allocate at least 8 GB of SSD space or even some GB more.
I also have 8 GB RAM and my pagefile size is 512 - 4096 MB. I never experienced that more than 512 MB were allocated.
I'm using Firefox with the default settings, only the Downloads go to a HDD.

 

No second hdd bay on the DV6T laptop, thats one of the reasons I like the idea of a RAM drive for temp storage with no image file for it. This will ensure all unnecessary files are erased on reboot.

 

i don't think a ram drive is necessary when you upgrade to ssd. and it seems you are more worried about the longevity of it so stick with an intel or crucial. i was, and still am hesitant about ssd. got one on the way now. what really started to catch my attention is multi tasking. no hiccups, burps, farts seem to be the norm once you go ssd.

 

TRIM is an option to increase WRITE performance on your SSD. Wear leveling is involved as that determines WHERE the write will occur, but the TRIM operation itself occurs when something must be deleted.

Today's SSDs read/write to their NAND flash medium in 4K pages. And a grouping of pages make up a block (usually 128 4K pages for 512K per block). And while reading/writing can occur at the PAGE level, deleting data from a disk cannot. Due to the makeup of NAND flash, a page must be "emptied" before it can be written - you cannot overwrite a page. This is important as DELETIONs occur at the BLOCK level (i.e. only a BLOCK can be emptied). This can cause a problem as out of .5MB of data on a block, not all of it has been deleted, and that data must remain.

If you think back to old platter based drives, when a file was deleted, the drive just marks those blocks as unused, and the drive would overwrite data that is there next time it needed to write. However, with SSD, when those pages are marked as unused, the disk goes on, but when it comes back around to re-using those NAND cells, the ENTIRE block must be read from disk, valid pages copied out, the entire BLOCK emptied, valid pages combined with the new pages can now be written back to the BLOCK.

You can see as you cycle back through a disk where blocks have used but deleted pages you would hit a WRITE performance problems. As soon you run out of "empty" pages, the extra operations are necessary to preserve page data on those soon to be emptied blocks.

Now, SSDs have a built in Garbage Collection (GC) routine in the controller that when idle goes through the drive scanning for deleted pages. It will go through the description above going through blocks and creating empty pages from deleted ones. However, that is all dependent on when you leave your machine idle.

Now let's get to TRIM. The TRIM command on a TRIM enabled OS w/ TRIM enabled drive changes the behavior of a DELETE. Instead of the old platter based way of just marking the file to be deleted, a delete followed by a TRIM command will tell the drive to copy used pages from the block, empty the block and re-write those pages back to the block at the time of deletion. So when it comes back around to WRITE to a page on that block the drive is free to do so. However, there are two requirements - a) the operating system must be configured to send the TRIM command with delete. b) the drive must be able to respond to the TRIM command.

Finally, In regards to RAIN, when you throw RAID into the mix, you now have to deal with a file's contents chopped up and spread (possibly CRC'd) over a number of drives. I believe GC will still work as that is controlled by the drive, but they've yet to update the RAID drivers to include the delete + TRIM command.

 

An SSD will definitely make your system 'snappier'. Boot & program load times will be -much- faster. Good move...

As far as the pagefile goes, make sure you have either maxed out your RAM or have as much as you can afford. You probably currently don't have a pagefile issue, or you'd have noticed it by now(chugging hard drive, etc).

As far as a ramdrive is concerned, yes, they are scary fast
The real question is do you need a ramdrive? The answer is yes if you have specific app(s) that slam your drives with I/O. The answer is yes if you do repeated I/O of a specific nature. Add more yes to these if your I/O is heavy on WRITE activity, since writes impact SSD more than reads.

Once again, if you currently have a problem, you'd probably already have noticed it.

Go here for the ramdrive I use on Win7 Pro:

RAMDisk - Software - Server Memory Products & Services - Dataram

There are many different ramdrives available out in webland. The above worked for me, so I didn't wade through 'em all. Plus, the <=4G version is free This ramdrive can be setup as an image file to be loaded by Win7 at boot time, too.

In my case, I setup my Windows Temp directory on the ramdrive. No pagefile there, as I don't have memory constraints and can leave a small pagefile defined on my SSD, with no issues. I -do- have an app which slams another SSD I have on my system with write activity for 6.5 hrs daily. The SSD is not capable of handling that much write activity efficiently, so I run the I/O to the ramdrive first, then have another utility which offloads it to the SSD at a more leisurely rate. Works well for me. Would NOT work as designed without the ramdrive. Another example of a ramdrive use would be if you were running a database app that was very active. I/O to ramdrive, with eventual updates to the DB on disk could work very well.

In -your- case, I'd for sure suggest the SSD; BIG diff there. As far as ramdrives are concerned, you could setup a small one for testing and migrate various functions to it: Windows temp folders, apps related folders, etc. Testing is the only way to really answer your question, as we don't know your workload and system limits.

Remember, tho, ramdrives go POOF when you reboot, so be sure you save anything you really need before rebooting.

At this point, I'd suggest you go with a small pagefile on your SSD. If you determine that it's a heavy hitter on I/O, you -could- experiment with putting it elsewhere, but you're most likely gonna find out it just doesn't matter. I like the above suggestion of putting your browser's cache out in memory. Whether that'll really help or not depends upon your browsing characteristics. Since browser cache is/can be heavy on read I/O, a cache on SSD can work very well too, since SSDs work best with read activity.

All tuning does is change what you wait on...if you're not waiting much, then you don't need much tuning. For most people, the quick READ response of an SSD will give them the most bang for the buck. It's usually only when running specific apps that you find a machine bogging down to the point of needing serious performance tuning. And most of that tuning can often be handled with adding some more memory.