Will increasing from 4GB to 8GB be noticeably quicker when i already have a SS 830 SSD?

Hi,

I have a SONY SVE1512J1E with win8 64-bit, i5 3210M, 4GB RAM, 680GB HDD (600GB spare) and 128GB SS 6830 SSD (just running the OS and a few programs = 49GB spare)

LAPTOP SPEC: SVE1512J1E | VAIO E Series Laptop | Technical Specifications | SVE1512J1EW.CEK | SVE1512J1E | Sony



My usage is fairly light = at max 5 apps open at once, GoogleChrome 1 browser with 10-12 open tabs, itunes, notepad, MS Word/Excel, thats it

But as the Vaio laptopt only has one RAM socket if i want to upgrade from 4GN DDR3 RAM to 8GB, i have to buy a single 8GB stick, costing about £60/$80

So i'm contemplating whether its worth the monehy to upgrade to 8GB,

Will increasing from 4GB to 8GB DDR3 RAM be significantly better performance/speed/multitasking ?

Or as i already have a good SSD, will the improvements be minimal / not worth the money?
all based on my usage

- on a different note, the 830 SSD is 128gb and i only have rhw Sony WIN8 OS with utilities, and under 'Computer' it says :
SS
49 GB free of 89.6GB

But the ssd has 128gb capacity?
i did delete the ssd contents before installing the os

thanks

 

Doing the math to convert advertised capacity to the capacity windows reports, brings it at 119 GB, there's aprobably a reovery partition taking up the rest of the space between 119 GB and 89 GB.

 

You can check your memory usage with many monitoring programs or by simply opening up Windows Task Manager. If it reports a percentage, make sure it's clear how much actual memory is being used, since the percentage may include a pagefile on your SSD. If you're pushing the limits of your RAM, an upgrade would be worthwhile, but if your usage never pushes the limits of your current RAM, you're probably wasting your money on an upgrade.

If the machine had two RAM slots, adding another 4GB stick would be a no-brainer, since it's a cheap way to get more RAM, boost RAM performance slightly, and boost iGPU performance significantly, but on a machine with a single DIMM slot, you want to know that you need the memory before you spend the money to upgrade.

 

The memory usage in task manager is not a good way to find out if more RAM would be good, since it will never show it "pushing the limits." It doesn't matter whether I have 4GB or 8GB, or if the page file enabled or disabled, the RAM % usage stays relatively constant between 60-70%.

With 8GB of RAM, there might not be a whole lot of difference in feel. Yes, it will be faster, but it would not be night and day like if you had a mechanical HDD. However, aside from a small bump in performance, it will greatly reduce writes to the hard drive, taking better care and prolonging the life of your SSD.

 

The part I made red is contrary to my experience. I'm sure Task Manager isn't the best tool for keeping track of RAM usage, but on the various computers I use, the RAM usage clearly varies from about 20% to about 80% depending on my workload, and when I doubled the RAM on my Envy 14, I found that RAM usage totals didn't change in similar usage scenarios. I did feel like my system was a bit more (as tilleroftheearth likes to say) "responsive", but if we're being totally honest, that was probably a placebo effect since I had just spent money upgrading my computer and I wanted to see results.

Question: you stated that more RAM will reduce hard drive writes. Is this only true of systems running a pagefile, or are there scenarios where a RAM-only memory system will save the hard drive some trouble?

 

thanks for the replies,

I jus opened task manager and under RAM it was: 2.2 of 3.9gb (56% free) - this was when i had my usual apps up and running.
what do you think of this? is upgrading to 8gb needed?

what is this pagefile people talk about, and how/should i disable it?

thanks

 

the increase in system Snappiness will only happen if you enable Prefetch and Superfetch as Windows will cache more data to the RAM array (which is still miles ahead of the best SSDs), you won't notice much otherwise. Pagefile is an archaic dinosaur, basically back when RAM was expensive and everything was on 32bit (which hardcapped RAM capacity to 3.2gb) Windows Pagefile allowed excess HDD/SSD capacity to be used as virtual RAM. Nowadays, it is not necessary unless you have 32bit apps that utilize more than 3gb of RAM. You disable it by going to System, then Advance system settings, Advance tab, Performance Setting button and then theres the pagefile.

 

IDK. My RAM usage remains fairly constant no matter what I am doing. Maybe because I never shut my computers down? I know that after a reboot the memory usage is fairly low, but hours later it is back up to 70% or so and stays there.

4GB to 8GB is very noticeable if you don't have an SSD.

I'm actually not sure.

 

Logically, this would only apply to systems using a pagefile that had insufficient RAM. In that case, there would be a significant amount of pagefile, and thus storage drive, use that would then be reduced as unneeded if the RAM was increased. If the system already has sufficient RAM, then increasing it won't make a difference.

 

A bit off topic, but if anyone's interested in more info on virtual memory (think page file): Pushing the Limits of Windows: Virtual Memory - Mark's Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs.

Personally, I would say that if you're the type to never shut down his computer, you could benefit from 8 GB simply because of superfetch. If you're very sensitive to system responsiveness, you might notice a tad more snap, but not everyone notices that kind of change.

 

It doesn't appear to work that way. Take a look at this. Results: First With 4 GB, Then With 16 GB Of RAM - Experiment: Can Adding RAM Improve Your SSD's Endurance?

 

*nods* like the test says, if you're using a page-file, or a program that will always cache what it's doing anyway (cs, Vegas, etc.), adding ram is probably going to reduce the writes to disk.

In some cases, it won't. Because the program might be set up to cache a certain type of content anyway. That's.. where you're running into trouble. Vegas works like that. You're making a raw file that can be run with less compression as a live-view, for example. And this will more or less always be written to disk, because it takes a while to create, and ram is volatile. So it makes "sense" for a value of teapot to do that.

Same with streaming music - caching it locally so you can retrieve it the day after and the next boot, etc., will make all kinds of sense, even if you could obviously cache the entire thing in memory.

So in that case, no you're not going to get less writes on the disk anyway.

Another thing is that if you're using windows, and want to get rid of the frequent caching that usually makes no difference on the performance of anything whatsoever - then removing the pagefile can actually save you ram space (not joking). Which.. when you're having 4Gb - which is much more than what the average computer had when Microsoft figured out the "recommended" size and usage of the pagefile - could very well speed up the way things work. Specially if your OS is on an ssd anyway, which has higher sustained IO transfer rates than slower ram used to have back in the day after all.. So for the specific usage of pagefiles for prefetching application libraries, removing the pagefile will simply disable the prefetching mechanism and stop the extremely frequent writes at practically no performance loss..

In any case.. not sure how much disabling the prefetching is going to improve the life-span of an ssd. It's very likely not a significant number. But be aware of that it's the actual prefetching mechanism you want to remove (and possibly the cache behaviour of certain apps.. say, it's possible to create a ram-disk and force Sony Vegas to write the cache there). And that if you still have a pagefile, and rely on Microsoft voodoo prefetching - then the amount of annoying writes is going to persist after adding.. 16 and 32 Gb of ram.

 

I have 32GB RAM in my system and reduced the pagefile considerably down to 1GB. I didn't disable it entirely since there are some programs that will use the pagefile anyway, regardless of how much memory is in the system. Disabling hibernation saved a lot of disk space as well. And regarding writes to storage, Samsung Magician tells me there have been 1.44 TB written to the SSD over the past year or so since I've owned the computer. Suffice to say, I have no concerns about reaching the limit of the program erase cycles.

 

I doubt it will be noticeably quicker. The extra pagefile writes to the ssd doesn't matter either because the ssd has more than enough endurance to handle it. And I'm not sure that even applies since you're only at 55% ram usage anyway.

My advice: save your money and just keep your current setup.