As discussed in another thread, I recently replaced my hard disk drive with an SSD to improve overall performance (which it did). Now I’m wondering if I should also instal more RAM. Currently I have 4 GB of it; it’s not a high-end system - it was a budget off-the-shelf Windows 8 PC when I bought it six years ago, and now, after all upgrades and updates, it runs Windows 10.
It’s not that the performance desperately requires more RAM - I only use the computer for office applications, internet browsing, using my employer’s working-from-home environment, and occasional games that are not very hardware intense. That all runs fine. But as I understand things, computers will create and use virtual RAM on the HDD/SSD if actually available RAM is insufficient. So I’m wondering if having only 4 GB of RAM (which I have heard is not a lot for Windows 10) would increase usage of the SSD via virtual RAM and thereby use up the limited number of write cycles that the SSD can endure. Is that a concern?
In principle it might, but there are nuances. Virtual memory use of the SSD will only cause issues when there are writes to the SSD. You can read from the SSD as much as you like. So what matters is not so much lots of virtual memory mapped to disk, but changes to the contents on disk. There is a lot of read-only data needed in computers - the actual executable images of the OS, applications, and for games - the game data. These can be mapped into virtual memory, read into RAM as needed, flushed to make space for other data, and re-read, all with no ill effect. But applications that are churning through memory are not going to be so benign. Browsers can be very poor citizens.
RAM is cheap. I would upgrade. There is nothing more depressing than a disk on the way out.
Thanks for the swift response. I invested in a second 4 GB RAM module, which (despite coming from another manufacturer) seems to work well with the existing 4 GB module. Curiously enough, my Windows settings (correctly) state that 8 GB of RAM are installed, but that only 6.94 GB of that are usable. That difference seems to be a commonly occurring issue, and I’ll follow advice from various websites on how to make the full memory usable by Windows.
As noted, that is probably because the integrated graphics processor is using some of it. That’s common for integrated graphics, while separate graphics cards have their own video memory.
I think adding the extra 4 GB was the right thing to do (coming from a different manufacturer is irrelevant as long as it meets the exact specs). I don’t think your SSD was in any danger of getting prematurely worn out, as the newer ones are pretty durable, but the extra memory is substantially going to improve performance. I added 4 GB myself shortly after I got this computer (which came with 4 GB), and the Windows Experience Index on Windows 7 went up substantially, I believe because the two memory sticks are interleaved. Before the memory upgrade, the WEI was 5.9, with the limiting factor being “memory operations per second”. After the upgrade, it was 7.7, which is impressive since the WEI only goes up to a maximum of 7.9!
The extra 4GB was definitely the right move regardless. “Simple web browsing” isn’t so simple anymore especially if you open multiple tabs. Social media sites, mapping, and company sites can be surprisingly intense, and web browsers are getting to be more and more like operating systems in their own right.
Do keep in mind that the system still creates virtual memory swap space on your drive, as that’s just how modern memory management works. So there will be some writing to the drive, but it’s rather inconsequential. It only becomes a problem if you actually run out of physical RAM and the system needs to start swapping data in and out. That’s called thrashing because on mechanical hard drives the read/write head would be constantly trying to move data causing a lot of audible chatter, and abysmal system performance. While SSDs are better at that, they’re still 1-2 orders of magnitude slower than RAM. No point in subjecting an SSD to that if it’s not necessary.
I don’t understand how it worked at all with only 4GB, to be honest. I was recently handed a laptop for work and it only had 8GB. I grew increasingly frustrated at the lack of performance until about the 5th week, when I decided I couldn’t tolerate it anymore. I jumped on Amazon and purchased another 8GB. Fortunately, it had a free slot and a single 8GB chip. I was worried that it might have a 4GB in each slot, in which case I would have had to purchase two chips instead of just the one. It works a lot better now.
Thank you everyone for your views. After the new SSD and the additional RAM stick my computer does work noticeably more smoothly (and with much less noise).
Typically it would not be a problem as I understand how computers use virtual memory. The computer knows virtual memory is virtual memory, and thus uses it only for things that it would like to keep in memory but doesn’t access it much nor does it change much - thus not wearing it out much.
Additional the amount of vram it likes to take is some ratio of the physical ram you have. Have more ram, it will use more vram, not less - unless you manually set limits. It is the ratio of ram to vram that matters and it makes sense too. Since your computer only had a small amount of ram, it only needs a small swapfile (vram) as it can only swap out a so much to ram. If you have more ram, it’s able to use and benefit from a larger swapfile, thus benefits from a larger swapfile.
Now there are other factors as well, and the largest one for shorting the life of the SSD would be if you have not enough ram for what your computer is doing and it has to swap out frequently to make up for it. In the physical HD days that was called thrashing, as you can hear the HD working over and over again. With SSD you don’t get that feedback, but may see the HD light as a indicator of thrashing. That would be one such thing that can cause premature failure.
The other thing would be if you are low on HD space, and files get fragmented. The computer would not be able to store things as it wants and things get jumbled up. On a physical platter that would cause the drive head to move excessively and read/write data slower as it jumps to free spaces and stand a higher chance of data corruption, though I’m not sure how SSD would handle it, and it might work faster with fragmentation as data read from one ‘area’ of the ‘disk’ can only be done so fast but it can access other areas in parallel. So in that I suspect that one is just risking greater chance of corruption of data with a full disk. Perhaps slower because it doesn’t have room to scatter the data into parallel blocks.
I would suspect the problem was more the single stick than the amount of RAM. A single stick runs half the speed of two sticks. And notebook RAM is often slower than Desktop RAM.
Though, if it was unbearable (pun intended), it could also be something about how it was configured. Your work may have had a lot of extra programs running that needed the extra RAM. Or it may have just needed a refresh.
I have no problem whatsoever with my two sticks of 4gb, to the point that I’m still not sure I’ll buy two more as I had originally intended (when the budget would allow). I think I’m going to prioritize the GPU instead.
I actually do have a machine that has 16 GB, but I found it hard to get it to use more than 8 GB without running a ton of junk. (I only got the extra RAM because I was able to get 3 sticks at once for the price of two.) Not even Chrome would use up all the RAM.
“Virtual Memory” in modern Windows is mostly just an addressing technique. It’s like your e-mail address is a “virtual” address for you. Having 4 different email addresses doesn’t mean that you have four different houses.
Everything in Windows is given a virtual memory location, inside the huge memory address space. That virtual memory location is mapped to a physical memory location, and, for stuff that was read from disk, it’s mapped to the disk where it was read from.
Only very rarely does Windows run out of physical memory and decide to write memory stuff to disk. In particular, nothing that was read from disk ever needs to be written – it’s already there on disk.
On the very rare occasions when Windows needs to write memory to disk, it needs the memory, and there are going to be problems if it can’t write. So it reserves disk space up front.
Which means — the virtual memory space on your SSD is the one part of the SSD which doesn’t get written too, and doesn’t wear out. It’s reserved in case it’s needed, which it never is.
I just want to add, for the sake of accuracy, that while most of the above is correct, the number of memory sticks involved is not, due to my forgetfulness. The computer has four memory slots with a maximum capacity of 32 GB. It initially had 2x 2 GB memory sticks for a total of 4 GB. I added two more 2 GB memory cards. So it wasn’t a transition from one memory stick to two, but from two to four. But anyway, the Windows memory performance index definitely went from 5.9 to 7.7 as a result.
By the way, I’d like to add that since these upgrades with the SSD and the additional RAM stick, I am monitoring resource usage on this machine via the Windows task manager more regularly than I used to. Turns out that RAM usage (of the new RAM increased from 4 to 8 GB) usually hovers around the 50 % mark. That would mean that the old unincreased memory was just barely not enough, right? So it was a good move to upgrade after all. And indeed, the vast majority of that usage is caused by my browser (Firefox).
Not necessarily, at least not based on that statistic. The more RAM available to the system, the more it will use for things like caching or retaining data in active memory. With only 4GB, when you quit Firefox the system would flush its memory very quickly, if not immediately, to make that available for other processes. With more RAM available, the system will simply leave Firefox’s memory where it is and only flush it if something else comes along that needs it. That’s why re-launching an app is usually much quicker than launching it the first time, because the system doesn’t have to reload it from disk. In fact, the system will try to gobble up as much free RAM as it can, because otherwise it’s not being used for anything, which is a waste of resources. Better to throw as much stuff into memory as possible and make that easily flushable for when a heavy-hitting task comes along.