bitflipper

 Regarding RAMDisks, they've largely fallen from favor for awhile now because disk drives are so much faster today than they were back when RAMDisks were popular. If you were to move the page file to a RAMDisk, it's sort of like robbing Peter to pay Paul - you'd be reducing RAM to make the process faster that mitigates insufficient RAM.

Well, I mentioned "If you have lots of RAM". Of course having small or average amount of RAM using such design it is not helping. I have invested in RAM when it's been kind of cheap and got 32GB and have after keeping 3GB RAMdrive for secondary pagefile, variable size (8-10) for temps still lot of free mem for apps. The true is in fact if Windows were designed little differently it should be option to work without it at all if plenty of RAM, but it doesn't work in real... What's more when Windows is trying to create pagefile but itself despite lots free memory it is so stupid it is trying to create 32GB pagefile... No comments needed :( So it is pointless to use its automatic 'smart' options... until they discover we have 2017 not 2001...

My experience with SSD drives is very different to some of the others who have posted comments on this topic. For one, unlike Bit...I constantly move stuff on and off my audio SSD drive. And it still seems to do the job. I will change the drive in the near future...but for just over a 100 bucks OZ (128gig), to have an ultra fast SSD drive for audio, and for it to last almost 3 years is a great return in my opinion. I do remember, when I got this SSD drive - I did some research, and there was a lot of conflicting reports about SSD drive and their fallibility. More research...I suspect lol.
 
Ben

bitflipper
To answer Kev's question, you can locate the paging file on any drive and even split it across multiple drives. You can also make its size fixed, saving the overhead of resizing it on the fly. Some will argue that paging to an SSD would be a performance boost, and that's (kind of) true. However, if you have 16 GB or more of RAM, the only time you're likely accessing the paging device is when you first start up a program, so using an SSD for it won't yield big performance boosts and putting it on an HDD won't significantly slow you down.

 
Maybe I need to clarify. The purpose of moving the pagefile and other stuff away from the o/s drive is to prolong the life of the drive. The fact that I have put these files onto another SSD is not really the point. It's a spare SSD (a Kingston HyperX), smaller and cheaper than the system drive (Samsung Pro 256GB). If the Kingston wears out before the Samsung, then that it not a problem.

The Windows pagefile will be almost never active on my computer. But there is no option to not have one. It's created anew at the start on every session and sits unused.

Keith Albright [Cakewalk]
SSDs work until they don't.  Because of limited (which improves with each gen) write cycles you want to avoid filling them.  Why? Because they do wear leveling.  So imagine if you run them close to full, they will be thrashing fewer cells more often and wearing them out sooner.  The higher capacity ones can store multiple values in a cell which means less potential for measuring the different values over time as the full capacitive charge degrades.  So, do your homework to be sure you get ones that are better quality and for critical work you may want to get single level cell rather than multiple.  No question the speed improvements are huge and worth it.  Just be aware of how you use them.  Generally not a good idea to run a defragment on them.  

This is true and also good info. But to be perfectly fair, every hard drive works until it doesn't. In fact hardware of all types works until it doesn't. No hardware is without failure modes.
 
As for the write cycle limits of SSD's, like I said good info. But as this article shows, while the write cycle limits will indeed kill SSD's dead, you really have to try pretty hard to get there. They were running torture test utilities on the drives and it still took 18 months to kill them all. And all the drives tested went far beyond the manufacturer spec'd number of write cycles before giving up the ghost. And those were the drives that existed 4 years ago. Stands to reason today's SSD's will fair even better.
 
So yeah, good info. You should try keep your SSDs from getting too full as it will reduce the service life. But we're talking about a service life that, for most people, is already likely to far exceed the useful life cycle of the machine as a whole. IOW be aware of it, but don't lose sleep over it in my opinion anyway.

It's getting difficult to find laptops that don't have SSDs.
 
Come to that, it's even difficult to find ones with enough "normal" USB connections.

I didn't get the "trying to prolong the life of the drive" comment.

I have been seeing more and more youtube videos on these newfangled SSDs called M.2 and NVME that supposedly plug into PCIe slots. However I don't think any can be used as a C drive, but they look tempting for storage.

 
Why cant they be used as C drives? 

millzy

I have been seeing more and more youtube videos on these newfangled SSDs called M.2 and NVME that supposedly plug into PCIe slots. However I don't think any can be used as a C drive, but they look tempting for storage.

 
Why cant they be used as C drives? 

 
A SATA drive is generally plug-and-play, so you can install an o/s on it as soon as you connect it up, whereas an m.2 drive requires proprietary drivers.

I use mine for current Sonar Projects.
 
I've thought to move Sonar to it, but Haven't done that yet.
 
For me, I like being able to have a crazy number of tracks in my practice projects.
I like to be able to just keep recording a part many times a night every night and not have to delete a heap to avoid dropouts.
 
Silly reason to want the drive, but it's nice to not have to delete 200 takes.
:-)

Well since this topic is still ongoing, I did a little research yesterday - as I said I would, and because I thought I had read that the SSD drives slowing down and problems from writing constantly onto an SSD drive were a myth - it would seem that there are a lot of conflicting beliefs on said topic. 
 
ZD Net says http://www.zdnet.com/article/worried-about-ssd-wear-you-probably-dont-need-to-be/ 
 
This blogger says http://blog.houzz.com/post/115950977148/the-myth-of-ssd-performance-degradation 
 
There was another article which reiterated some of the comments in this thread.
 
Here is my take on the situation after doing the research and thinking about everything SSD drives. In the beginning, I suspect SSD drives did have the problems that posters on this thread believed they had, but like early digital...the technology improved out of sight. Then what happens is the old problems associated with the technology, becomes ingrained...like a myth that had an element of truth, but never was the full truth.
 
I wouldn't worry too much about SSD drives failing personally, so long as everything is backed up. If you have a boot SSD, and an audio SSD drive...you will see benefits - like improved boot times, improved program start times, and indeed higher track count and lower latency. The only time I would use a spindle drive in this day and age, is as a storage drive, and indeed this is what all my spindle drives are used for.
 
This however, is just my opinion, which I have gleaned from using an SSD drive for audio for the last 3 years.
 
Ben - I hope this helps the OP