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

[ajcroteau]

This assumes you have windows 8 configured to use your SSD drive as virtual swap space... If your running an SSD drive, chances are your running a mechanical drive and you should've setup at least a small partition on the mechanical drive, possibly 5-10%, as swap space for windows. In that case, the amount of RAM your running is irrelevant to the life of your SSD drive...

 

[ajcroteau]

This assumes you have windows 8 configured to use your SSD drive as virtual swap space... If your running an SSD drive, chances are your running a mechanical drive and you should've setup at least a small partition on the mechanical drive, possibly 5-10%, as swap space for windows. In that case, the amount of RAM your running is irrelevant to the life of your SSD drive...

 

[JackNaylorPE]

I'm a bit confused ..... the pic on page 1 shows four RAM modules.... which appears to make sense if ya used 1 module to get 4GB and 4 modules to get 16 GB.... but the test system listing says 2 x 8GB. And if ya did use 4GB using just one module, I'm a bit concerned that it wasn't 2 x 2GB since we are talking dual channel RAM.

And yes, at this point in time, I'd say 80% of builds are getting done with 2 x 4GB, I'd guess 15% with 16GB and outta the rest, I'd guess as many 32 GB as 4 GB. I just don't see the 4GB comparison as being relevant to most of the THG audience.

As for the why have the page file on SSD ? Well why have an SSD ? What is it exactly that you want to have sped up ? Are peeps investing $135 - $250 just to drop boot times down from 21.2 seconds (2 TB Barracuda XT) to 15.6 seconds (THG Tier 1 SSDs) ?

 

[MrCommunistGen]

You can crucify me for only skimming the article, but I didn't see any mention of the page file. I'd imagine that the programs aren't just arbitrarily writing more or less to disk due to the amount RAM in the system. The system with 4GB is likely running out of RAM and swapping to disk a la pagefile.sys. For those who are truly looking to minimize writes to NAND, move the page file to a different non-SSD disk. Sure, there'll be a performance hit since you're paging to a slower spinning disk, but getting more RAM will alleviate this once paging is no longer required.

I'd be interested to see what benchmark completion time looks like with 4GB vs 16GB with current settings, and then again with the pagefile on a different disk. I'd imagine that 4GB will be slower in either case, but will take a larger hit when paging to a slower spinning disk.

 

[fkr]

history of RAM prices
http://www.jcmit.com/mem2013.htm

we are still at all time lows really. and if you still shop the deals you can still get some very comparable prices to a year ago.

that 32 gigs for $100 is a pretty extreme deal and what speed was that ram and by what manufacturer.

 

[InvalidError]

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.

Merely "not hitting the limit" to the point that Windows needs to create a temporary pagefile is not good enough - you still need some more RAM to accommodate file cache so programs do not need to reload data from HDD/SSD all the time.

The programs I have opened all the time use 8-12GB combined total and I need another 12-18GB to cache all their frequently accessed files to practically eliminate all disk read IO during typical use. When I had "only 16GB" RAM, I had to spread my programs and data across three HDDs to spread out the IO load so performance wouldn't completely collapse when actively using more than one at a time. With 32GB RAM, I can run them all off the same HDD without worrying about read performance beyond initial loading.

 

[06yfz450ridr]

Well when you have enough memory and an ssd you should disable the paging file which will help more than adding ram

 

[06yfz450ridr]

Well when you have enough memory and an ssd you should disable the paging file which will help more than adding ram

 

[photonboy]

8GB is plenty.
It is NOT true that you can "never have enough RAM". I have 16GB and my PC rarely goes above 3GB. I've never, ever used all 8GB except when video editing (most of 16GB).

People buying 16GB or more are just wasting their money if they don't need it.

 

[InvalidError]

I have 16GB and my PC rarely goes above 3GB. I've never, ever used all 8GB except when video editing (most of 16GB).

You might want to take a look at how much of that 16GB you are actually using as disk cache after using your computer for a while. While simple games and applications like WoW might not use more than 1-1.5GB explicitly, applications and games with large data sets (WoW is around 30GB) do tend to end up using several times more RAM indirectly through the OS disk cache. The more you use your games and applications, the more of their data set ends up on disk cache and the more responsive they become.

With 16GB, most people will never need to reload things from disk until their next reboot. With "only 8GB", this does not extend much beyond the most recently used large-ish application or game. With 4GB, most stuff will be constantly hitting the drive(s) to reload stuff and page in/out.

 

[lunyone]

history of RAM prices
http://www.jcmit.com/mem2013.htm

we are still at all time lows really. and if you still shop the deals you can still get some very comparable prices to a year ago.

that 32 gigs for $100 is a pretty extreme deal and what speed was that ram and by what manufacturer.

G.Skill 1600 mHz CAS 9 at 1.5v and was around Dec.-Jan time frame. Most 32 gb sets around that time were around $120-140 range.

 

[HideOut]

Early in the comments a great point was made. The application matters greatly. You won't see much if any improvement in gaming above about 8gig unless you are doing something like a 4k rig. Making this broad of a statement while only sampling three content creation programs does not accurately reflect most of us out there in the real world.

 

[swifty_morgan]

nice review. now add 16 more gb ( 32 ) and see what happens..?....... please?

 

[rolli59]

Why not have 8GB as well since it well known that it reduces the use of the page file drastically with 64bit OS?

 

[InvalidError]

Why not have 8GB as well since it well known that it reduces the use of the page file drastically with 64bit OS?

I remember upgrading from 4GB to 8GB making WoW much smoother after WotLK came out. Load times when bouncing between zones (such as dying during raids/heroics or porting out) also became much shorter.

For people who run only one large-ish application or game at a time, 8GB would likely yield most of the same benefits as 16GB most of the time.

 

[Tarek Saber]

does that mean that adding more RAM to a system with SSD will increase the time till its lifetime end by reducing information writen to the SSD?

 

[InvalidError]

does that mean that adding more RAM to a system with SSD will increase the time till its lifetime end by reducing information writen to the SSD?

That's exactly what the "experiment" says.

If you reduce writes by ~45% by going from 4GB to 16GB, you have roughly doubled your SSD's write endurance so it may last about twice as long.

 

[3ogdy]

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.

After browsing on Chrome (20tabs open) and constantly browsing on Firefox (786 tabs open - yes, I know, it's crazy; many of them are YouTube tabs - read: flash), and running multiple applications and various update processes, my system (equipped with 16GB of DDR3) running Windows 7 has 9357MB cached, 11945MB available and 2742MB free - data taken from the Physical Memory section under the performance tab in Task Manager.
I own the SSD830 128GB.
I have changed the location of temporary files in order for them to be stored on the 7200RPM 2TB drive since I was concerned about the reliability of SSDs in general.
I cannot tell you how much of a difference in performance 16GB of RAM make when compared to 8GB because the 16GB kit was bought straight from the beginning.
In Windows, I barely use more than 6GB of RAM, but when it comes to mega-tasking, rendering videos(which can take up about 14GB+ of RAM), running a ton of software at the same time, 16GB of RAM is a blessing.

 

[smeezekitty]

After browsing on Chrome (20tabs open) and constantly browsing on Firefox (786 tabs open - yes, I know, it's crazy; many of them are YouTube tabs - read: flash),

WOW(!!)
And I thought 68 firefox tabs was a fair amount.

 

[3ogdy]

After browsing on Chrome (20tabs open) and constantly browsing on Firefox (786 tabs open - yes, I know, it's crazy; many of them are YouTube tabs - read: flash),

WOW(!!)
And I thought 68 firefox tabs was a fair amount.

You don't know the half of it:
That's Chrome and Firefox
Apart from those 2, I use:
Opera : 47 tabs
Maxthon: 13 tabs
Seamonkey : :2 tabs
Waterfox : 0 tabs , since it works through Firefox
Coolnovo :81 tabs

Despite the amount of tabs, the only browser that's poorly organized when it comes to the content of such tabs is Firefox - the rest of them have all or most of their tabs open on related pages - I split all my tasks across browsers and not across tabs, that is.
The system has an Eyefinity configuration so I tend to run quite a lot of software at the same time.

Oh, and you know what? Running nothing but Firefox, the Physical Memory Usage Graph barely reaches 4.5GB.

 

[jerreece]

Fairly short sited test/article. You only tested @ 4GB and 16GB? Why not 8GB? Why not 12GB? Why only with desktop applications? No video, no gaming, etc? Let's face it, using memory demanding titles with a modern 64bit OS and only having 4GB of RAM is going to force hard disk read/writes.

So you've proven that cars drive farther when their gas tank if full versus half. But you haven't figured out where the sweet spot is. This kind of article/test should be much more thorough.

 

[edmoncu]

What are the page file setting differences between the 4gb ram and 16gb ram tests?

 

[edmoncu]

also, more RAM, less paging... but BIGGER pagefile? uhm, this is a pain im getting on my x79 board with 64gb ram. :-(

 

[Fatesadvent]

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.

Running 2 games (League of Legends and Bioshock Infinite, firefox with ~10 tabs, and a few other programs)

Memory in task manager
16259 total
8930 cache
10800 available
2080 free

 

[fkr]

history of RAM prices
http://www.jcmit.com/mem2013.htm

we are still at all time lows really. and if you still shop the deals you can still get some very comparable prices to a year ago.

that 32 gigs for $100 is a pretty extreme deal and what speed was that ram and by what manufacturer.

G.Skill 1600 mHz CAS 9 at 1.5v and was around Dec.-Jan time frame. Most 32 gb sets around that time were around $120-140 range.

maybe i missed the very bottom of the market. i remember 32gig kits being $140 at there lowest. i guess now you could find a deal to get you down to $180-200. so we are on a little upswing, but will it last. I think ram will continue to be cheap and we are a very mature stage for ddr3 production and i expect until production starts really ramping up for another type of memory we will continue to see low prices and maybe even new all time lows (btw the graph supports this theory) In the end for an 8 gig system the price difference does not seem that great to me. especially when i think back how much ram cost last century.