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Tuesday, April 22, 2008

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Sumocat Experiments With The Pagefile

This looks like an experiment worth following. Mark “Sumocat” Sumimoto found himself concerned about the heat is Tablet PC generated and of course the fan running to cool things down. According to Sumocat, the pagefile is one of the big culprits that keep disks spinning, so he’s been experimenting with turning it off and lately with directing the pagefile to an SD card.

Sort of like having the benefits of having a SSD drive without the cost to a certain degree. Check out his results and the pros and cons.

Tags: pagefile, Tablet+PC

Tablet PC | Ultra Mobile PC

4/22/2008 5:53 AM MST

Sumocat Experiments With The Pagefile Comments [9] | Digg This | del.icio.us | Citations

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 6:18:34 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

That kind of continued writing to an SD card will kill it in relatively short order though. Fortunately they are cheap these days. But flash memory has, what, 100k write cycles to any given spot before it fails?

Even with the intelligence in the cards nowadays to write data to varying parts of the memory to minimize the chances of such failure, that limit will be reached pretty fast when using it for caching. Aside from the slow speed of SD access as well.

cr0ft

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 6:55:31 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

cr0ft: C'mon dude, give me a little credit. I already spotted the wear-out issue as one of my cons. Furthermore, I've made it part of the experiment. I know the card will wear out quickly. The question no one seems to have answered is how quickly. I'm willing to sacrifice a fresh SD card (and enjoy the benefits of that sacrifice) to find out.

Sumocat

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 9:35:34 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Okay, you can give me less credit. Apparently those VM settings are meaningless. I just checked my drives and found the pagefile still on the hard drive. It's stubbornly going to the default drive regardless. Must be some other factor at work though because I set it back to normal for comparison and it ran hotter again. The switch does appear to be fixing things. I just don't know how.

Sumocat

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 9:50:20 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

This is a great find!

I will probably try it out with my M200, whose fan is a little shot, so heat is a real issue. (The backlights are also a bit dim, so I probably won't

Paul Harrigan

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 4:04:55 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Craig, is there a pagefile on the SD card at all? Is it possible that it uses both somehow?

Paul

Paul Harrigan

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 5:28:39 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Paul: um, in the absence of a Craig, I assume you mean me. :)

Nope, no pagefile on the SD card. XP is accepting the setting but not applying it. Looks like all I actually did was tighten the pagefile down to a size that eliminated disk thrashing. Same result (less hard drive activity), just not the way I was trying to do it.

Sumocat

Tuesday, April 22, 2008 8:11:52 PM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Sumo,

You're right! I guess I should give up this tablet stuff and go back to 1st grade reading and writing.

Thanks for the details.

Paul

Paul Harrigan

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 6:18:13 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

I wonder which would be better, no pagefile and the SD card used with ReadyBoost, or no ReadyBoost and a pagefile on the card? Or maybe even half and half?

Scriptable

Wednesday, April 23, 2008 6:31:06 AM (Mountain Daylight Time, UTC-06:00)

Paul: Give up on tablet stuff? I'm the one who didn't notice my SD card was still blank. If anyone should be giving up, it's me (but I stubbornly refuse).

Sumocat

Comments are closed.