Microsoft says page file on an SSD is a good thing

[John Doe]

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

According to that…

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger
sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs
handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing
on pagefile reads and writes, we find that Pagefile.sys reads
outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1, Pagefile.sys read
sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4
KB, and 88% less than 16 KB. Pagefile.sys writes are relatively
large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being
exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the
favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns,
there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

 

[Paul]

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-a-for-solid-state-drives-and.aspx

According to that…

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger
sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs
handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing
on pagefile reads and writes, we find that Pagefile.sys reads
outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1, Pagefile.sys read
sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4
KB, and 88% less than 16 KB. Pagefile.sys writes are relatively
large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being
exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the
favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns,
there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

That's a "performance versus lifetime" discussion.

The author of that blog, is only discussing the performance aspect.

And no question, paging to an SSD is going to be ultra-fast. Zero
seek time, makes up for the sins of how Windows uses the thing.
(It's the worst kind of I/O, 4KB random read/write.)

But in terms of lifetime, it all depends on how often you push
memory usage to the point that the pagefile is being used. That
might increase your average gigabytes/day of writes for example.

If you have gobs of RAM, there's a good chance only a minimal
amount of pagefile activity at startup is occurring. It might be
quiet for most of the rest of a session.

On some of the OSes, there is an option to "clear the pagefile"
at shutdown. If you had a 4GB pagefile (minimum allocation), then
you'd be doing 4GB of writes at every shutdown. So for peace of
mind, you might decide whether to turn that off on the SSD. On
a hard drive, it would only be the time penalty of doing so,
that would be a consideration. Clearing pagefile, is supposed to
be for security purposes (so no copies of documents or passwords
that were stored in memory, sit on the hard drive for forensic
recovery).

Paul