Older, smaller SSD for pagefile!

[Metanis]

I had some older equipment and software laying around...

AMD Phenom II X6 1090T CPU (6 cores, 3.2GHz) on an older Gigabyte AM2+ MB
8GB DDR2-1200 RAM
2 each Seagate 1TB striped in raid 0 for performance reasons --> OS installed here
1 each Samsung 60GB SSD --> allocated 24GB of this drive for the system Pagefile
1 each Toshiba 2TB standalone drive -- Dedicated for daily Windows Backup usage.

installed Server 2012 Datacenter from a spare Educational key I had leftover from my college days.

The hardware is all at least 5 years old but that thing is fast! The SSD came out of my desktop build after I replaced it with a 240GB OCZ I found on sale at Newegg. 60GB just isn't enough today even if you are good at keeping it clean.

So I thought it would be interesting to experiment with using the SSD as the sole pagefile. Server 2012 seems to like it pretty well. I figured the pagefile at 3 x the physical RAM kind of like some of the early Windows XP guidance!

PS I know that striping isn't recommended for a production environment. But this is just a toy to play around with Windows Update Services 4.0 since it looks like Microsoft is abandoning WSUS 3.2 on Server 2008R2.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

Pagefile across multiple or all spindles really helps. A lot of people just leave it on the C (system) drive....the same drive tons of temp directories live in.
If your server has at least another RAID volume(s)...for E and F drive or whatever, I add a page file to all of those too. Really increases speed. For just a DC or even basic file server, it won't hit the pagefile much. But for database/app servers.....where tons of RAM get used, pagefile gets used a lot and this is where you really see performance boosts.

Use fast drives for the data share volume. Business/production servers rarely boot up...they stay running 24x7. so the speed of C ain't all too important.

 

[Ldsmv8]

Just a heads up I had some issues with the older Samsung 60 gig SSDs... Make sure you update the firmware, if I recall it was something to do with trim malfunctioning. I will look through my old notes but had several that slowed to a crawl until the firmware fixed the issue.