The pagefile sustains some pretty heavy writing most of the time. If you're trying to conserve the life of the SSD drive then it's not a good place for the pagefile.

Note that even on conventional drives defragmenting is pretty much a useless task and creates an enormous amount of extra wear and tear that can shorten the life of the drive too. Your mechanical/magnetic drives will last longer without defragmenting and suffer almost no performance degradation without it.

If your rendering involves material which is being "smart rendered" (copied) and the source material and the render is on the same disk, then you would see a decrease in "render" times because SSD has much faster access times and faster transfer rates. If your material is actually being rendered with color correction, titles and other filters, then you won't see any noticeable decrease in render times. Practically speaking, the most cost effective render scenario is to have your source material on one drive and render to a separate physical drive. If you're smart rendering you will achieve about 1/3 the speed of an SSD at less than 1/10 of the cost. If you're actually rendering, then you will achieve the same speed for 10 times the cost. Right now, having an SSD for your system drive makes some sense, using an SSD for video media does not.

I agree, John. It makes zero sense to use an SSD for a render and media drive. By the way, it is a very risky practice to defragment media drives, despite the fact that some people recommend it, regardless of whether it's an SSD or mechanical media.

As for the point that Kelly makes, AFAIK, it is my standard practice to have source and target drives separate. Since there is no mechanical read head to go flying about, I find it improves performance to have my pagefile on the SSD, so, I choose to take that hit on lifetime.

One other procedure I've been playing with that seems to be working well for smaller renders is to use RAMDRIVE to reserve 4GB of my 12GB RAM memory as a virtual drive for use as a Scratch Disk. It also serves as the location of my TEMP files. The beauty of this is both speed(with I/O speeds of about 220mbps) and that the TEMP file flushes itself when I power down. Clearly, this can't be done without some headroom in RAM, which I can now implement because of a 64 bit OS.

As an aside, there are several utilities online that are designed to optimize win7 for SSD's. They are rather a curiousity to look at exactly what system optimizations they perform to increase system performance with an SSD.

I just helped a friend install an Intel X25V ( 40 gigs) ..on his i5-750/Win7 system for use as a boot drive. Boot times are way better. Programs open faster. The whole feel is smoother. We set AHCI in the bios prior to installing Win7 .. This is recommended. Win7 automatically sets TRIM function which should lengthen the life the drive at optimum performance. Cost was $100 delivered to his door. Very worthwhile if you want to cure slow boot times and slow program opening times. Also, of course, runs dead quiet. He doesn't run Vegas but I agree with comments above. Makes sense as boot drive not for video files. Cost of large SSD just not worth it yet.

my Intel X25 was the best upgrade I've ever done; I use it for boot.

question:
"use RAMDRIVE to reserve 4GB of my 12GB RAM memory as a virtual drive"

can you put your pagefile on it? Did you use a utility to create the RAMDRIVE?

If putting the pagefile on the SSD significantly reduces the life of that SSD, I wonder if it makes sense to buy a 2nd SSD that is small & pretty cheap dedicated to the pagefile? It'd sure be a lot cheaper to replace when it dies & you don't risk losing any data you care about or have to go through the pain of reinstalling Windows. Newegg has a 8GB SDD for $90, which still isn't cheap, but may be better than killing your $400 drive & data prematurely!

The whole point of a pagefile is to cache some of what would normally fill RAM somewhere else to free up space in RAM. It's sort of like running out of desk space because you've got too many papers spread on your desk, so you temporarily carefully move some of them into a drawer until you need them again.

Making a RAMdrive to hold the pagefile is an absolutely futile endeavor. It's like declaring a portion of your desk is a place to hold papers that won't fit on your desk. If you have enough desk space to do that, then you don't need to move papers from your desk to your desk to make room.

If you think you have enough RAM to hold everything in RAM, then simple turn off the pagefile completely. Set it's size to 0 and don't use it at all.

yeah, I think it's counter-productive to put a pagefile on RAM. I guess i also beleive that the write cycles on an SSD are quite high. With controlled use of erase/write cycles, an SSD should last 4-5 years of steady use. Technology moves so fast that long before the useful life of my SSD's expire, I'll move on to something newer and better. So, my sacrifice of the SSD doesn't look so catastrophic when viewed in this light. Nothing is forever.


By the way RAMDISK is a free utility, or you can pay for an upgrade...here:
www.dataram.com

today newegg has (had?) a 60 gb SSD for $87:
http://mail.google.com/mail/?ui=2&zx=1ori295rg7ypz&shva=1#trash/12c15cc7bdda16df

"Making a RAMdrive to hold the pagefile is an absolutely futile endeavor."

is that really true? I would swear that I read somewhere that Windows always parked some of the OS on the Pagefile.sys, regardless of amount of RAM (I have 12 gb). Maybe my recollection is in error, or my source was outdated, or wrong?

The ideal page file is supposed to be 1.5 x the amount of RAM, so you may still be at cross purposes if creating it on a RAM drive...

I would think if there was an advantage to doing this, someone would have demonstrated it by now .. I have Googled up endless discussions regarding this, with no clear indication, based on actual use, that it is a good idea..


The best advice I can find, is to install the page file on it's own partition, on a physical drive that is different than your work disk for media and rendering output.
I don't think the speed advantage of an SSD would translate to faster work flow as far as the page file is concerned ..

I installed the X25 (40G) model in my last 'new' build about 6 months ago.
I agree with everyone else that the boot time and running was all snappier, but found out quickly that 40gig as an OS drive fills up rather quickly. Windows just keeps on adding all kinds of stuff.
So I ended up taking it and made a 'working' media drive out of it
It does nothing for me regarding render times.
I guess I am waiting for larger SSD's before I commit one to an OS drive

Setting up a page file in RAM made sense back in the days of MS-DOS when the OS was limited to 640K and maybe to a limited extent in the earlier days of 16/32bit windows when you were limited to 4GB. But with a 64bit OS now having no feasible RAM limit it doesn't make sense.

Plus I think Windows Vista and 7 are designed with large RAM banks in mind so it will cache parts of the OS into the extra unused RAM just in case it is requested.

"is that really true? I would swear that I read somewhere that Windows always parked some of the OS on the Pagefile.sys, regardless of amount of RAM (I have 12 gb). Maybe my recollection is in error, or my source was outdated, or wrong?"

No, you are correct. All Windows since XP (and Unix/Linux for that matter) always wants to have page space. Always. Programs like to and are allowed to pre-allocate as much memory as they want. Even if they are never ever going to actually use it. Sometimes those programs properly deallocate memory, sometimes they don't. Sometimes, programs leave parts of themselves in allocated memory just in case you are going to run that program again. If you have no page file and a program wants to commit some for itself, your PC will crash.

I think I need to focus my original question better.
My question was about Solid State Disk (SSD). I never said Flash ROM. And every reply assumed the Flash variety.

The SSD referenced in my original post uses DDR RAM. Not Flash. The drive has a battery backup, so it is non-volatile, but DDR Ram is much faster than the Flash memory in SSD's.

I am going to do some tests using a RAMdisk utility, and if I can speed up renders, I will buy one of the referenced drives.

Actually the SSD you refferenced is still seen as an HDD by the BIOS and OS.
It uses a PCIe interface instead of SATA ( although there are SATA controllers on the device ) , and is almost twice as fast as your typical SATA SSD's because it uses two controllers to access the NAND chips, effectively creating a RAID 0 configuration.
According to the link provided below, two Standard SSD's configured in RAID 0, achieved somewhat better bandwidth..
" Although not charted above, a pair of SandForce-driven SF-1200 SSDs configured with 128K-stripes in a RAID-0 set produced 579 MBps peak read speeds, and 545 MBps peak write bandwidth. "

The OS sees it as a drive, not RAM, and it cannot be used to create a RAM drive.

A lot of info here:
http://benchmarkreviews.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=596&Itemid=60

P.S.

There are DDR RAM drives available, though not always faster than SSD's. They are still seen as drives, and not as RAM..

http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255


To be seen as RAM, the storage has to actually exist on the memory bus system.

Boy, is my face red!!
I went back to my original post, and I had posted the wrong link.

Here's the right one:
http://www.acard.com/english/fb01-product.jsp?idno_no=271&prod_no=ans-9010b&type1_title=%20solid%20state%20drive&type1_idno=13

Hope this makes more sense.

Can I blame a senior moment?

My link where I edited my post above is about the Acard.

I know, that's what prompted me to look at my original post.
I don't need more system RAM or non-volatility (flash). I am looking at offloading the disk I/O to the ramdrive to see if there's a measurable effect on render times. There has to be a lot of disk I/O during render because the disk activity LED flashes continuously.

"The OS sees it as a drive, not RAM, and it cannot be used to create a RAM drive."
Because the drive is made from DDR RAM, then it is probably *better* than a RAMdrive because it doesn't consume system resources.