Second Hard Drive failure - What would you do going forward?

[Platypus]

I have an SSD for my primary hard drive in my Windows7 system. And like a good citizen, I put my paging file on a second HDD. I'm sure I read that it's best not to have your paging file on an SSD.

So the HDD failed this afternoon (damnit) and this stopped Windows from booting. Mild panic starts! Luckily I had a spare HDD kicking about so I installed it and thank goodness that the machine then booted up.

But the experience has made me jittery! I was thinking about

(a) replacing the HDD with a second SSD (more reliable than HDD?)
(b) running without a Paging file (I know this can and does cause issues)
(c) putting my paging file back on the first SSD, but won't this massively increase the number of I/Os and make it more likely to fail ?
(d) just stick with the new HDD and go back to the way things were

What would you guys do? Anyone know what 'best practice' is these days?

TIA.

[vwdan]

Modern SSD's should be able to easily sustain having a paging file there - I certainly wouldn't be worrying about it and I'm not sure why your question focusses on it so much?

You had a failure, it happens - get a new SSD in and crack on!

[VectraMan]

RAID 1. If one fails, you just carry on and buy a new one at your leisure.

But yes, surely the best place for a swap file is on the fastest disk you have. If you're worrying about SSDs wearing out, don't buy one.

[Platypus]

I'm not sure why your question focusses on it so much?

For this reason:

Traditionally, many have said no page file on an SSD because you want to minimize R/W activity, as FLASH chips have a limited lifespan. Wear leveling helps considerably, but SSDs will eventually die and we don't want them to die sooner.

However, the thread on there continues to say "don't worry about it these days"
Page file on SSD, shorter life - but does that matter now? [Solved] - SSD - Storage

I think I'll replace the "paging" HDD with an SSD.

[veroli]

page files are a bit of relic/hangover from the days when ram was expensive and not plentiful. Although the OS will still use them if you have a decent amount of RAM 8GB and above and are not running intensive server applications(like SQL or Exchange that will use up all the ram available to them) then paging should be quite minimal and won't stress your SSD at all. I personally use SSD's for boot drives and where i cant move the pagefile, like in my laptop, i just dont worry about it. You should be fine.

[unixman]

As long as the amount of memory you are using is less than your installed RAM, i/o to the paging file should be minimal. Check memory usage in Window Task Manager. For a desktop it is quite likely you are not paging much.

[administrator]

64GB RAM in the desktop = winner! What everyone else said, RAID1 the drive and replace on failure. And backup. Always backup. And backup the backups just to be safe

[NickFitz]

However, the thread on there continues to say "don't worry about it these days"
Page file on SSD, shorter life - but does that matter now? [Solved] - SSD - Storage

I think I'll replace the "paging" HDD with an SSD.

Just came across this interesting email about using SSDs on build servers for an OSS project over the last couple of years, with lots of raw data: 1-2 year SSD wear on build boxes has been minimal.

[BHicks]

Just came across this interesting email about using SSDs on build servers for an OSS project over the last couple of years, with lots of raw data: 1-2 year SSD wear on build boxes has been minimal.

For another viewpoint on SSD longevity, take a look at this where they have units that have survived having 2 Petabytes written to them:

The SSD Endurance Experiment: Two freaking petabytes - The Tech Report - Page 1

For balance, I have two laptops that both have SSDs as their primary storage and paging file location.

One of them (an Elitebook with 16GB RAM) I shifted the Temp drive to a RAM disc which makes certain operations absolutely fly. I've only ever purchased Samsung SSDs and to date, haven't had any failures. Having said that, as I'm a cynical git and have had spinning rust units fail spectacularly before, important files are backed up to the home NAS (Qnap) and also via CrashPlan as well.

[yasockie]

As others have said - don't worry about SSD wear nowadays.
After 3-5 you need to worry about their reliability anyway, so no need to bother with minimising wear.


As for HDD, I have 2 HDD using Windows Storage Spaces in Parity mode. If one of the drive fails, I can take out and replace it whit another. Can't rememeber the whole argument, but it's slighly better than Raid-1, but if you want, you could do raid 1 indeed.

In other words to have good fault tolerance, store your OS, cache etc on a fast SSD. Store you sensitive data on a mirrored HDD + 1 or 2 backups - 1 local + 1 cloud.
That's how I do anyways.