<![CDATA[As we migrated to a 1:1 environment at our school I knew from experience that the only way to do it well was with all SSDs in our laptops. My experiences have told me that users rarely put away laptops correctly. This leads to many problems with windows loads, ruined drives, and a lot of headache. SSDs are a great way to save yourself a lot of headaches, as well as making your users very happy. We had an one issue, the original laptops only had 2Gb of RAM and we were seeing SSDs last only 3 years as the use of the swap files overused the SSDs with countless writes.
This year we decided to upgrade the RAM to 4Gb and take away the swap file. The increased RAM would theoretically reduce the need for the swap file while also eliminating thousands of possible swap file writes. The idea could possible increase SSD lifetime many fold.
Our research on the subject always warned against removing the swap file. But all the warnings (on a myriad of websites) seemed to be repeating the same concerns, with no actual testing. So we decided to take the leap.
Tested systems.
- Dell E6500 Latitude laptops with 4Gb of RAM, 64Gb SSDs, Windows 10 LTSB (32 bit,) Office 2016, and a variety of other programs .
- Dell E6520 Latitude laptops with 8Gb of RAM, 128Gb SSDs, Windows 10 LTSB (64 bit,) Office 2016, and a variety of other programs .
We started with a couple dozen systems and asked students to complete a google form and let us know How things were going. 2 months in and we are up to 100+ laptops with the swap file removed.
So far our students have reported 0 system hangups and 0 blue screens. These were the two common reasons most people said it was a bad idea. Only time will tell if this actually extends the life of our SSDs, but to those out there saying it doesn’t work, I think your should try it before you actually advise against it.]]>