With an SSD installed, would 8Gb to 16Gb RAM have no impact?

Hi there

For "Officy" type products adding more RAM probably would only make marginal difference. If you run any VM's at all --even just 1 then RAM makes a big difference -- Virtual Machines just EAT RAM for breakfast -- even smallish ones like XP VM's or some Linux VM's will use up RAM. Plus having more RAM will allow you to run more applications at the same time.

Given -- always assuming you've got sufficient in the first place (a Laptop with W10 should have 8GB as a minimum these days) -- a choice between more RAM and an SSD - having an SSD instead of an HDD will yield the biggest performance gain, especially on lower powered CPU machines.

Cheers
jimbo

The concept of using VM's long interested me, but I was always behind the technology curve with insufficient CPU power to pull it off. I left it alone for quite some time. But now I'm at the point where I'm encouraged that running multiple O/S and VM's can be done with most reasonably well performing computers. So having that RAM would certainly help. I'll have to get that additional 8Gb then.

You are comparing apples to oranges. An SSD will speed up performance in one area while extra memory may speed up performance in another area (if it was a problem before). This is like asking which is a better upgrade for your car, a better air-intake or better brakes. You have to assess the performance of the laptop and decide what is lacking. I haven't used a non-SSD in about 4-5 years now. Standard spinner HDDs are generally the weakest link in the performance chain, so I'm always in favor of going SSD. That being said, you can assess memory usage to determine if you need more than 8 GB. For regular usage, 8 GB could be more than enough. However, it also could be easy to need more than 16 GB based on what you run on the laptop.

DeaconFrost said:

You are comparing apples to oranges. An SSD will speed up performance in one area while extra memory may speed up performance in another area (if it was a problem before). This is like asking which is a better upgrade for your car, a better air-intake or better brakes. You have to assess the performance of the laptop and decide what is lacking. I haven't used a non-SSD in about 4-5 years now. Standard spinner HDDs are generally the weakest link in the performance chain, so I'm always in favor of going SSD. That being said, you can assess memory usage to determine if you need more than 8 GB. For regular usage, 8 GB could be more than enough. However, it also could be easy to need more than 16 GB based on what you run on the laptop.

My only argument would be that it's comparing different apples versus apples compared to oranges. As you well know, the O/S uses paging on the hard drive to serve as a cache to compensate for the limited amount of RAM. Thus an 8Gb RAM machine effectively ends up with virtually double or more by having an 8Gb or larger paging file. And if that paging file is on a spinner... slow. If it's on an SSD, then it's faster. But in the end, the paging function introduces lag that wouldn't otherwise be there with extra RAM. Not noticeable without any memory intensive processing... until you start to tax it, with something like VM instances.

Infrasonic said:

To complicate matters further SSD's use DRAM cache (which is how the better performers achieve decent sustained read/write speeds), and of course Optane is now an option on very recent hardware, which can also be configured to act as a dual cache for both a HDD data drive as well as an SSD boot... So the line between RAM and storage is blurring as the latency gap narrows (NVMe being lower latency than SATA for instance.)

Currently more RAM is a no brainer for tasks that need it (VM's etc.) but I wonder how long it will be before solid state storage (Optane DIMMS?) gets to the point where loads of RAM is a moot point, especially on a cost / benefit analysis.

Hi there

while you make good points - it's always the same with technology -- we can always expect cheaper, faster and better improvements later but if you need the improvements now then like all things in life "Risk to Reward" ratio.

At the present time with decently cheap DDR4 RAM then that makes sense if you want to run a load of VM's.
A lot of Linux VM's for instance run totally or overwhelmingly in memory once the OS has booted .

Currently SSD's over 1TB are still too mega expensive when you consider for around 100 USD/EUR you can get cheap fast USB3 4TB spinners and internal HDD's.

Of course I wouldn't consider anything other than an SSD for the OS and some VM data (vmdk virtual disk files) but for things like multi media streaming and file sharing say as a NAS then expensive SSD's for this are just not good value for money (currently of course - things can change as prices drop).

However one can't ignore politics totally and Trumps trade war (possible) with China could also throw all these calculations out of the window. A lot of electronics uses "Rare Earths" (actually not particularly rare in the scheme of things) which are sourced 95% from China although there's exploration going on in the USA, Australia and strangely enough in the county of Cornwall in England.

Cheers
jimbo

No, 8gb is fine for laptops unless running memory hog programs, like above watch task manager, you may ony be using 4gb. my huge server is running now on 3.5 gb, I have several background programs that run, of course if I fire up a game it will use more, but youd need a gaming rig laptop to need more than 8 at this point in time, by the time windows is hogging more memory due to updates your machine will be slow enough youll want to replace, had a work computer on win 7 a couple to 3 years ago, added SSD, BIG improvement, went from 8 to 12gb, zero improvement.

More memory would only be needed for virtual pc environments if you wanted to specifically assign memory to a virtual system