2nd SSD for page file?

[Faust]

Heya, all!

Couple weeks ago my main system died after ~6 years.

Built a new system (X399 chipset) and was wondering in a SSD environment, if having a separate physical drive for the swap/page file would be of any benefit? I would assume all the M.2 slots run on the same controller but using the SATA controller wouldn't make any sense due to the slower bus speed?

[Philip]

NVMe is the newer fast standard, note not all M.2 SSDs are NVMe, some may be SATA depending on the MoBo/chipset.

I would rather get one bigger NVMe SSD than two smaller ones. There are several reasons for this, at least for me, mainly:
- Larger SSDs do better job of wear leveling across all cells.
- Larger drives allow for smaller percentage of the drive to be filled, reducing effects of write amplification.
- Larger drives often have higher endurance in TBW (total terabytes written) and even speeds.

SATA 3 speed maxes out at 600 MB/s, SATA 2 at 300 MB/s, NVMe can go up to 3.5GB/s. Modern SSDs can get close to the speed of a SATA 3 connection, but not nearly the speed of NVMe. I would just put enough RAM, get one larger NVMe SSD, and not worry about the SWAP space much, it will not get used a lot with enough RAM anyway, and if it does, only files that are not needed, i.e. not that much writing. If you need storage drives spinners are just fine as well.

If your system has 8 or 16GB of RAM that should be plenty not to worry about the page file, I usually set it to a constant 1GB or something like that.

[Faust]

Howdy, Philip!

Your bullet points were informative and definitely make sense. FWIW, the SSD is a M.2 NVMe 1TB Intel 760p. Nothing exotic, was shooting for more towards reliability (assuming Intel SSDs still fall in that catagory).

Skipping the whole SWAP file makes sense as well. There's adequate system memory for that.

Sounds like keeping it simple would be the bets bet.



Cheers, bud!

[Philip]

Hi Faust, glad to see you

Yeah, Intel SSDs are great. In fact the SG server (and the backup server) are running Intel 730s in RAID 1 as the OS drives. Haven't had a failure yet, been running for the last couple of years without a hitch.
Long time since SCSI, heh, just saw your user title. I remember when we were running those Seagate Cheetah 10k RPM SCSI drives in RAID-1 with a hot spare on the server.

[YeOldeStonecat]

Faust Can't Fly!
Ahhh...the good old days of flying the Dauntless in Battlefield 1942...and swooping under the bridge. And trying other stunts!

What's up wanker? Long time no hear from ya!
In the past I was a fan of separate spindles...but I agree with Philip..with todays current SSDs...they're so dang fast, just keep it simple, and stuff the box with RAM.

Here Here for the legendary Seagate Cheetah Fast Cats! Loved the X15's.

[Faust]

Those were LIES, I tells ya. I was perfectly capable of flying.

It's really simple. Just jump into the only fly-thinglie around, peg the throttle to make sure I abandon anyone else on my team on the airstrip, then ditch it mid-air for some unknown reason 5 seconds later. Never figured out where all the hate came from

Yeah, some good times then. Once Punkbuster dropped support it kinda died. I've pondered trying to petition the gaming community (unsure exactly how I would go about that) to drum up some interest in a re-release of BF'42 and if possible Desert Combat. I'd play that. Hell, I'd buy the game again in today's money to enjoy that again. It wouldn't surprise me if it could run in a browser at its normal level of detail sorta like Quake III:Arena did back in, what... 2005 or so?

Ugh, I'm babbling.