Is Your RAM Buddy-F*cking Your SSD?

[Cremate]

So, I built my computer from scratch back in April, as some of you may have been around to know. And one of the "newer" technologies that I decided to go with this time around is an SSD (Solid State Drive). In essence, it's a drive with no moving parts, unlike traditional Hard Drives of most computers in the last 15 years... No moving parts equates to "nearly" instant access to data. Long story short, they are substantially faster than 99% of the Hard Drives available for your PC. Boot Times that take 2 minutes on an HDD, take 15 seconds on an SSD. The downside is, they cost about upwards of 8x more per Gigabyte than a standard HDD. As in, you can buy a decent 500GB HDD for ~$50.... but to get a 500GB SSD you are looking at $300-$400 (though prices are dropping).

Anyways, enough laymen terms/banter, since if you are reading past this point you probably have at least a base knowledge of computer Hardware and weren't bored to death by the first paragraph.

I put a 128GB SSD in my rig with a 1TB HDD for storage. As with most Drives of any type, the box may read one amount of space, but you actually get a bit less writable space. My SSD had something like 115GB of actual writable space on it. I planned to use the SSD primarily for Windows and 1-2 of my most played games. To my surprise and dismay, after installing just Windows and WoW, I had apparently used nearly 90 GBs up already. I didn't give it much thought at the time. As time has gone on over the last few months, and despite me trying to funnel most of my programs and downloads to my 1TB drive... the remaining 25GBs on the SSD had shrunk down to 2GBs... and my Windows Index for Data Access Speed dropped from 7.9 out of a perfect 8, to a measly 5.6. I began having to go file-hunting with my "delete gun" every few days just to avoid hitting the SSDs full capacity.

Long Story a bit shorter... The old saying "you learn something new everyday" gave me a nerdgasm today as I decided to optimize the efficiency of my SSD. I started going through the files with a fine toothed comb, scratching my head on what could possibly be taking up sooooo much space. Nothing seemed to be the culprit. Sure, I had installed WoW, and Photoshop, etc... but no really huge files to warrant 115GBs of space. Then it clicked to me... Page Files. Windows utilizes a portion of your primary Hard Drive as "backup memory" in case you run out of RAM. This amount is usually proportional to the amount of RAM you have.

Here's where it gets interesting (not really)... I went all crazy with my RAM when I built this rig because I wanted to "future-proof" my computer. I got 32GBs of high speed DDR3... complete overkill for any Home computer applications nowadays. In comparison... most Home PCs won't use more than 4GBs for at least the next year or two... and even most Gaming Enthusiast computer systems are built with 8GBs to 12GBs. Well, low and behold, Windows was using a 25 Gigabyte backup paging file because I have so much RAM... any of you that know about computer functions will understand how absolutely absurd it is for a paging file to be that big. And with 32GBs of built in system RAM... it will never even be touched (with a few obvious exceptions). I lowered my paging file from 26542MB to 1024MB. Instantly 25Gigs of SSD space freed up!

So I started to do some more research and I came acrossed THIS BLOG. The author starts by pointing out Hibernation as another culprit that uses unnecessary space on your SSD... and after disabling powercfg -h I freed up another 30GBs of SSD space. Here are the steps for doing it, but I strongly recommend you read through the article and determine if it's the right choice for your rig. And it goes without saying... you don't want to do this if you aren't booting from an SSD.

--Click the Start button and type "cmd"
--Right click the item that appears and select Run as administrator
--In the opened DOS command prompt window type powercfg –h off and press Enter
The hibernate.sys file that is used by the hibernation process will be then deleted and you will gain disk space on your SSD equal to the size of your RAM.

So, in the end I freed up over 50GBs of space on my SSD, by eliminating some of the Windows process fluff that isn't necessary for my rig.

[Toddless]

Very nice! I personally use a velciraptor hdd as my boot device but I work for a popular retailer and supposedly ssd drives are going to be a hot ticket item this year for black friday. Predicted to be as cheap as .50 cents per gig I might grab one and ill be sure to look for these tricks because even with 10 teras in my current rig I always need more room. Especially with the new expansion soon to be looming over us bringing probably another 8-15 gigs.

[Bacontime]

Cremate I came here for the title and was crit with a wall of text!

[Xyonjia]

Getting rid of the page file is step 1 on all ssd's

I run 4 of them in my desktop for work and gaming and 1 on my laptop.

[Fresco]

Weird i built my pc and from day one i was at 7.7 score and until this day it is at 7.7.. granted I took extra measure to optimize my windows to run on an SSD...

[Cremate]

Getting rid of the page file is step 1 on all ssd's

Not if the system is bottlenecked by RAM.
There are plenty of forums and articles to reference, and pros and cons to each side... in my case, and many cases, it was a good idea.

Weird i built my pc and from day one i was at 7.7 score and until this day it is at 7.7.. granted I took extra measure to optimize my windows to run on an SSD...

My index drop could have been caused by a number of things... but the story sounded juicier with some measurable data.

[Cremate]

double post

[Buy]

When I built my computer I was going to get a 128gb ssd and a 500gb hdd, but ended up getting a 250gb ssd and no hdd at all. I'm a minimalist so I really only use around 150gb total.

[Dotmatrics]

This may be a little late, but what ev'.

Pagefile is also important for dumping memory errors to in the case of failure. Since in your case, you have so much RAM, you could really relocate the pagefile over to the 1 TB. It shouldn't reduce performance since it would rarely be touched anyway.

You may want to look into shadow copies also, they can be a huge waste of space, especially on an SSD Hard drive. Shadow copies are used to "go back" to an earlier version of a file. Sounds cool, but if you are smart and doing regular backups, it is pointless.

Lastly, there is a wonderful program that does visual representations of your hard drive. It sounds German but is just truncated Windows Directory Statistics otherwise known as Windirstat. It is a free program, and helps identify the largest space offenders. Many times you will find that windows updates, symantec (norton), or in my case WoW (49gb) are bloated and that fat can be gleaned.

[Houtoku]

Sorry to necro but I just wanted to say thanks to Cremate for this thread. I recently upgraded my rig from 8GB > 16GB (one of my DIMMs died, figured I'd just upgrade since I was already replacing the RAM anyway and saw a 16GB kit cheap) and the exact same thing happened, lost a huge chunk of my SSD + WEI dropped from 7.5 > 5.6 because of the Primary hard disk data transfer rate score. Helped me free up 20Gb of space on my boot SSD and brought me back up to 7.5. Blasted page file got boosted to 20GB, I guess when it detected the higher RAM.

[Cremate]

Glad to help!