RAM and SSD Life

I've been reading a little about SSD life and page filing, although I'm still not quite sure about it all. My question is: if there is more ram in a laptop, say 8gb against 4gb, will this reduce page filing, and therefore extend the life of the SSD significantly?

 

Yes. 10Chars.

 

By how much are we talking? If i was to get more ram, this would probably be the mail reason for it, and I'm just wondering if it would be worth it.

 

What are your usage patterns, and how much are you hitting the page file right now?

 

I don't know, i haven't actually bought the laptop yet, but i'm wondering how much ram i should get if it's going to make a big difference.

i have 2gb ram on this desktop with a hdd, and task manager is telling me i've got 1.11GB in page file, but i don't have as much stuff open as i usually do, and i've never checked it before.

 

What are you planning on using the laptop for? If it's just surfing and word processing, etc. then you'll be fine with 4GB.
The issue with pagefile and SSD as I understand it is that you don't want to be running out of ram and have to use the pagefile for virtual RAM as you're trying to keep SSD writes to a minimum for longevity.
That'd be why you would take your usage habits into account. If there's going to be alot of photo editing, larger-scale audio or video production, or a HUGE number of windows open and running processes simultaneously, I'd go with 8GB ram.
RAM's relatively cheap right now, so you could get your laptop with 4GB and look on the performance monitor while working to see if you're getting alot of hard faults with your memory (writing to pagefile), and see if the $80 upgrade is worth it to you.

 

The write to page file is a non issue as far as SSD life is concern.

For general usage, SSD life is not something one needs to be concerned. It may be an issue if you are writing 10G+ per day that usually means some form of video editing/capturing.

Anyway, new purchase should have 4GB as standard(given the current price) and preferably 8GB if budget allows.

 

It isn't even a problem if you write 10gb+ per day. I'm well over 12gb per day and SMART value 231 in the Toolbox still hasn't ticked down to 99% yet. I have 1544gb of writes on my Vertex 2 since September 1st. A big chunk of those of writes were in the first 2 weeks where I was racking up gigabytes with benchmarks and a couple of botched windows installs.

Assuming the monthly average remains roughly the same and SMART 231 were to tick down to 99% right now, I'd still have something on the order of 13 years left on this drive.

 

I have no experience with Sandforce(other than a two day bad experience then returned).

My figure is based on Intel published numbers of my 80GB. It is said to be good for at least 7TB write. so a 10GB/day would net me 2 years of usage which is still in line with the published number.

And the 7TB is a conservative one anyway.

The take home message is still the same, never worry about page file write that would affect SSD life. Windows 7 page file write is not that heavy, no way that would lead to noticeable difference(may be a few hours).