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

Given my current situation, I'm likely going to keep my current HP notebook for at least a couple more years. I recently upgraded the main drive to an SSD and the performance boost is phenomenal. It has 8Gb of RAM with one slot open, so I was thinking of installing another 8Gb with used memory (pretty cheap now, about $35). Would that accomplish any improvement? I'm not a developer, so I don't run a memory hog like Visual Studio, but I do periodic editing in Photoshop/Illustrator (with the SSD, performance is just fine). If the RAM upgrade wouldn't do much, I'm thinking it still might be a good idea for a hardware fail safe -- meaning, if the RAM in slot 0 somehow develops a fault, the RAM in slot 1 would help prevent the computer from becoming unusable.

I moved from 4 to 8 and cannot detect any difference.

I didn't expect to see a difference. My RAM usage has been pretty constant at 2 to 3 GB for years. I went to 8 only because I was building a new machine and needed to buy new RAM anyway. At that time it was cheap---8 GB of 2666 for under $50.

Keep track of how much you are using when going through your normal routines--it's easy enough to do. Unless you are crowding what you now have, I wouldn't expect to benefit noticeably from more.

Berton said:

Two things, one is programs can always use more RAM while the SSD is storage and the other is you'll get better performance by adding the second RAM module then assuring the BIOS is seeing dual-channel access. It's always best if the RAM modules are very close to identical to each other.

Since system page caching to an SSD is much faster than to an HDD, I thought perhaps it would be close enough to RAM such that it wouldn't make much of a difference. But I hadn't considered dual-channel access. I'm actually planning to pick up a RAM module of the exact specs and brand, a duplicate of the other RAM SODIMM (Micron).

Yes Dual channel will make a difference, 800 RAM Becomes 1600 1600 becomes 3200, also the more ram you have the less that needs to be written to disk Page file, and no SSD speeds are nowhere near RAM Speeds

cereberus said:

Monitor your RAM usage in Task Manager, and you can assess if you regularly need over 8GB. As others say, use of virtual machines certainly munches menory.

That's good advice. Check out your most memory hungry activity and consider more RAM if you use well over half the available memory. I'm currently using email and web browsing on my laptop which reports using 3GB of 8GB. Opening Photoshop which is memory hungry boosts this to 4.1GB. hence I'm OK with memory.