Experiment: Can Adding RAM Improve Your SSD's Endurance?

[jabliese]

Good start, but needs more. Some of these are mentioned elsewhere in this thread.

16 GB with and without a Ram drive for the swap file. The idea of a very small swap file, mentioned in the comments, sounds intriguing. And, of course, moving the swap file to mechanical disk, probably the easiest way to protect your SSD.

Comparison with an AMD system, for any chipset difference.

More information on memory use as the benchmarks run would be great.

It's a good article, but kind of thin. And not even a "we have more coming later" teaser at the end.

 

[edlivian]

or you could have just simply turned off virtual memory, and you could have went one step further and put in 32GB of Ram and turned it into a ramdisk and you would see a ridiculous improvement in less writes to the ssd.

 

[xomm]

...What about 8GB? Surely it'd make sense to include benchmarks for the most popular enthusiast quantity of RAM...

 

[emccalment]

I wish this article would have done the same with 8GB and 24GB, so we could see how the changes scaled with improvements.

 

[csm101]

please do more test like with games , browsing, office s/w useage and build the overall pictuer. if the big picuter prooves the same as this , then i will be amongst meny that will increase ram. currenlty running 2gb*3 in a i7 950 and i realy like to expand my SSD life more...

 

[slomo4sho]

One can potentially expect to utilize all of the available ram in a 4GB system but 8GB may be enough for most applications. Wouldn't it be wiser to also include 8GB in test?

 

[none12345]

What, ram makes a difference in ram limited applications.....who knew!

People still buy systems with 4GB of ram these days? 8 should be the minimum considered on a new pc. A new normal pc that is. A media workstation should have as much as you can cram into it.

And progress in ram lately has been sad. We should be at 16-32GB/module(instead of 8) by now. With low end systems coming with at least 8GB. But, it seems like progress in ICs in the last few years has really slowed down.

 

[smeezekitty]

I don't suggest putting your swap file on your SSD. It will eat up the write cycles as well as valuable gigabytes.

Put it on your data drive instead. Although it is slower if you have enough RAM it won't be a problem.

Why bother getting an SSD if you are going to not use it? Wearing out is usually rather exaggerated in its relevance.

Because why waste space and life time if you can avoid it.
You should have very little swapping occurring if you have enough RAM. To the point that having the swap file on a mechanical drive not be a problem.

duh? More RAM = less paging = more performance and lower use of the HDD.

Also remember, its not the amount of unused RAM that matters, its the amount of continual free space. If I have a 1MB data structure, I need 1MB of contiguous free RAM to store it. You could, in theory, have a Gigabyte of RAM free, but if you don't have that 1MB block, you need to store data on the HDD to make room.

Sorry but this is incorrect. The reason that CPUs since the 80386 have a memory management unit is just for this reason.

You can setup a virtual memory address that the CPU uses a lookup table to transparently map it to real memory, even across fragments.

 

[GIJoeMyGoodness]

This article is sorely lacking more information. I do appreciate the different types of articles you guys have been adding lately but 4GB to 16GB is a big jump. As others have mentioned, can we see 8GB and 32GB tests, and more than 3 different programs? Thanks!

 

[StephenWA]

Thank you. This article is helpful. I am building a Haswell system, 4770, with a ASRock Z87 Extreme6 and 16 GB Corsair Ballistix Sport. That MB has a hardware solution ram drive I intend to use, PS CS6 and Painter, etc. I will have to put off going to 32 GB and Win 8 for a few months as Win7 Home only supports 16GB. I would be very interested in 16 vs 32 GB testing as well as RAM drive solutions purely software vs MB solutions like the XFast RAM from ASRock. Bye the way the current testing was very relevant as I stitch very large collections of source images together.

 

[knowom]

Nothing surprising I used supercache/fancycache years ago on my flash drives and the difference is out right profound.

 

[computertech82]

This article is NOT about ram, it's about VIRTUAL MEMORY.

 

[Marcus52]

Very nice little article; kinda shows something we all "should have realized".

I'm not sure it is entirely relevant though. It isn't like a modern consumer SSD is going to fail on you in any reasonable length of time anyway. I do think 8GB is still the best "save money but still keep an eye on overall performance" option.

As far as the price of memory right now - yeah, it has increased a lot in the last year, but we were also in a crisis-level pricing market for DRAM back then. We simply could not expect those prices to hold over time. In the history of things, it is still relatively inexpensive. I can understand both sides of that discussion.

 

[popatim]

I wish you would have taken this further, testing 32gb with and without some of it in a ramddrive for virtual memory.

 

[MC_K7]

Interesting article, but it's a bad decision not to include a test with 8GB of RAM. This is what most people have, and this is what I have in my system right now. So I would like to know if it's worth upgrading to 16GB? Is 8GB performing closer to 4GB or 16GB? Is there a big difference between 8GB and 16GB? I understand there's a 63% reduction in writes jumping from 4GB to 16GB. But who knows? Maybe there's only a 5% reduction jumping from 8 to 16GB, but we don't have the numbers unfortunately. 🙁

 

[edman545]

Just turn off the swap file all together. I've been running 8 gb of ram for 3 years now and I just disable it completely. Only a handful of times have I ever gotten the "out of memory" error. I can't believe we are still using HDD as extra ram with the capacity we have now.

 

[hannibal]

I would love to see 8 and 32 GB data points added...

Yep, that would be nice. Is there a sweet spot in there or what. Ofcource it depends a lot of program you are using. I supose that most games are just fine with even 4 Gb, but some other programs like video editing etc. would benefit for more memory allso for disk write purpose.

 

[xrodney]

CTRL + ALT + Delete > Start Task Manager > Performance

After web browsing with 10 tabs open, playing World of Warcraft and Counter-Strike: GO, I have 3562 total, 1318 cached, 1421 available, and 122 free. That's 60% used and 40% available.

Can somebody with 8 and 16GB post their results with similar usage? It would be interesting to see if the cached value changes.

Well available memory does not mean its empty, its used as cache for data that you used but are not needed at moment and it reduce load from disk.
My memory is usually 4GB used, 8GB cached and 4 GB free after gaming session, but going up to 8GB used, 7GB cached and 500MB free when actually gaming or playing with various programs.

Before I used 8GB ram and going to 16 had considerable effect for loading times and even fps in more demanding games without need to close everything.

 

[xrodney]

Just turn off the swap file all together. I've been running 8 gb of ram for 3 years now and I just disable it completely. Only a handful of times have I ever gotten the "out of memory" error. I can't believe we are still using HDD as extra ram with the capacity we have now.

I had already before problem that some older programs refused to start because of missing swap so I now rather keep it at 100MB just in case.

 

[wavetrex]

- 1TB Seagate HDD with over 200MB/s transfer
- Intel 335 SSD used as cache with Intel SRT (Z77 board)
- 32GB of ram.
- Fancycache using half of that in write-back mode.

Blazing fast setup !
2 months of intense usage (programming, gaming, other stuff)
Only 500GB of data actually written on the SSD during this time.

Pure win!
(and somewhat low cost as well, definitely cheaper than a 512GB SSD)

 

[87ninefiveone]

I can't help but wonder if the conclusion in this article is a bit off. I think testing with another higher tier (say 16GB) of RAM should have been performed as well. I think that in between 4-8GB is probably the region that most systems are able to actively tie up with a few running programs. I know on my Win7 64-bit machine that with 8GB of RAM I typically use 2-3GB with nothing running and maybe in the 4-5 GB range with a game or a few internet tabs and multimedia software running. I do not however recall ever maxing out 8GB of physical memory under any circumstance. To me that would suggest that you reach a point when you aren't able to further utilize additional RAM and beyond that point (say 8GB?) you get diminishing or no returns. I highly doubt that this phenomenon would scale any further than what was looked at in this article, and I think that if the author had simply monitored free memory during the testing he would have reached a different conclusion.

 

[Michael Wolfe]

I facepalmed so hard at this...
Did you even bother testing any of this with Virtual Memory disabled?
You know, that function of the OS that writes extended RAM data to the HDD/SSD as needed?
Disabling that will prevent ALL aspects of having less RAM effecting your HDD/SSD in the slightest. Albeit, if you have too little real RAM, you may encounter Out of Memory Errors. 8GB is a solid average for gaming to not have those errors.

 

[zcoot]

Should have included 8 GB, and -maybe- 32 GB.

Yeah I think they should do this in the expanded version of the article.

They should also see how quad channel goes with 64 GB etc on a 2011 socket.

 

[gnaex]

I have two systems with W7 and 8GB, one with SSD/HDD and HDD only. They are running for over two years withe heavy gaming etc. On those two I've disabled the pagefile completely and so far only hit the limit very few time (Adobe AE). MIght be worth a thought too.

 

[menetlaus]

Next articles from toms in this series:

A faster CPU means faster completion times - Experiment: does a faster CPU improve performance.

A larger hard drive means more storage for your system - Experiment: Can a larger hard drive improve the amount of data you can store.

Memorizing means less time looking up notes - Experiment: Can keeping things in memory reduce one's reliance on reading/writing post-it notes.

aka DUH! more ram means more things can be held in memory and less will need to be saved to the page file because the space is needed less often.