Does adding/removing ram too often cause damage?

Assuming you handle the memory chip with care, will the computer suffer some fault if you keep adding and removing ram all the time?

I plan to remove two 4gb ram chips when doing usual stuff, and every time I'm video editing etc I'll add it back. When I'm done I'll remove the ram chips again. When I decide to use ram intensive apps I add it back. Adding extra ram because I'll need it, and removing it to decrease power consumption when it's not needed. Each ram chip will add approx 10w even when not in use so it's more financially wise to remove it, but add it back when needed.

If I repeat this cycle often but don't physically cause damage to the ram chips, will I cause any damage to the computer still?

 

Why would you do this?

And yes, you'll damage them (eventually...).

 

You'll probably damage the retention clips long before the slot, but it would take a while.

Before you go about this plan, there are other factors at play here:
Are you using a HDD or an SSD? Do you have under 4GB installed permanently? If you're on an HDD, the power savings could be significantly reduced by the hard drive spinning up to swap data.
You'd also need to power up and down constantly to swap out the RAM (no sleep, no hibernate. full shutdown), so you'd be eating power during unusable time during the shutdown and startup, eating into more of your power savings.
Add in possible damage to the RAM itself just from the stress of being inserted and removed so often, and it's not such a favorable course of action anymore.

 

Just put2 sticks of RAM an put 50MB paging file. That's it. SSD saves a lot power but it costs money.

 

Definitely a "tripping over dollars to pick up dimes" situation.

 

Not sure if trolling... but I'll bite.

You do realize that with less RAM, the computer needs to use the hard drive more, decreasing your battery life? A hard drive uses a few (2-5) Watts when under load. Windows caches stuff in RAM over time so it doesn't need to use page file. If you go to the resource monitor you can see when your computer asks for something from the hard drive because it couldn't find it in the RAM (Hard faults).

Each RAM stick is not using 10W of energy unless you're overvolting it or something. 10W is worthy of at least passive cooling for silicon since dopant drift becomes an issue after sustained temperatures of over 100C, which would be reached in just a few minutes without some sort of cooling solution.

I am unsure how you're judging "financially wise" since you're basically hotplugging a part that is designed for maybe a few dozen uses instead of a few thousand like USB/audio/firewire ports. RAM ports are not resilient against that sort of stuff (hence the small exposed wires), so eventually you might physically wear it out, or more likely accidentally impart a voltage higher than the RAM is designed to handle, killing the RAM.

In either case, I would doubt your pennies of electricity savings are really worth it, as you're risking parts that are worth $20-$60 (RAM-motherboard) at the very least. Let's assume you save even 20W of energy by having less RAM (which I think is absurdly high). And let's say you're paying 25 cents per kilowatt hour (also high). You would have to have your computer on for 50 hours to save 25 cents. So, after 80 days of this, you will have saved enough for another RAM stick if you killed that (again, this is an absolute best-case scenario where you find RAM for cheap and pay extra for electricity). If you killed your motherboard and had to get a new one for say, $60, you would have to run with the lower amount of RAM for 240 days. If your RAM change is saving you just half of what I estimated (10W instead of 20W), double these times. If you can't find cheap replacement RAM, that's even longer. If you're talking about a notebook, well this is probably one of the stupidest things I've heard on this forum since notebook motherboards are often well over $100.

This does not seem financially nor time efficient.

 

My 2 cents. I thought he was using it for using longer on battery.
I thought that no matter how much RAM sticks or what CPU is AC adapter uses same wattage anyways, doesn't it?

 

BTW, 10W per stick of RAM is absurd. You'll find a plethora of threads about 9" netbooks running at 12-15W idle-load. Desktop DDR3 is typically estimated at 5W or so for power supply calculations. 10-15W calcs might have worked for 3.3V SDRAM, but DDR3 runs at 1.5V or less. Haven't got a clue whether laptop DDR3 is substantially different, but there's no way it's more than desktop power consumption.

 

As stated, you would likely damage the metal clips for the RAM likely before damaging the modules unless you damage the gold contacts on the RAM.