Which laptop upgrade: HDD to SSD or 2GB to 4GB RAM?

[dee-u]

I am more inclined to believe the HDD to SSD would be better but I just want to make sure. Of course, I'm into programming (.Net, VB6, SQL Server, NetBeans).

[Nightwalker83]

I would be incline to think likewise that is unless you are going to be coding RAM intensive games, etc.

[dee-u]

To get the best of both worlds, I will just upgrade both. =)

[mbutler755]

4GB is the least amount of memory I would have. The laptop I use for development has 16GB of RAM. I think you are right in upgrading both. With the SSD, you will pay more, but it is fast. RAM is inexpensive, buy as much as your box will hold.

[NancyMerrison]

Hy,

Upgrate both is a good idea.

[dee-u]

4GB is the least amount of memory I would have. The laptop I use for development has 16GB of RAM. I think you are right in upgrading both. With the SSD, you will pay more, but it is fast. RAM is inexpensive, buy as much as your box will hold.

If you are using 4GB of ram, are you able to use as much? I think I am not reaching past 3GB in my development machine even if I have 4GB so I am wondering if it is worth it adding more RAM if I am unable to use it?

[szlamany]

I'm curious - what does this 2.96 GB USABLE thing mean??

[dee-u]

If I am not mistaken the 1.04GB is already reserved most probably by your video card and you can now just use up to 2.96GB of RAM.

[firoz.raj]

I'm curious - what does this 2.96 GB USABLE thing mean??

means 2.96 it will use for Stack and heap purpose .rest 1.04 it will reserve for cache memory .

[szlamany]

Is that because I have a 1gb card in the laptop for readycache? Or is that noted someplace else??

[dee-u]

I'm curious - what does this 2.96 GB USABLE thing mean??

This is from Microsoft.

[stanav]

I am more inclined to believe the HDD to SSD would be better but I just want to make sure. Of course, I'm into programming (.Net, VB6, SQL Server, NetBeans).

What OS are you running? 32 or 64 bit?

[techgnome]

Having had an SSD for the past year or so... it's barely worth it... they still have realiability issues (I had to have mine swapped out three times in a 4 month period)... and they have a limited Write cycle lifetime before failure... in other words, don't do a lot of heavy writing to it (unless you don't care about your database, don't put the DB on an SSD)... reading from it is fast and simple... if you're doing write-once read-lots, then they are great (for like streaming music, video, etc)...

What I've got now seems to be a really ideal setup:
a 125GB SSD with Windows installed, this is the boot drive, and where most of my applications go... I then have a secondary 500GB standard HD where all my data, databases, websites, other applications and my heavy read/write processing happens. Win 7 64-bit with 8GB RAM... so far, I'm loving it...

-tg

[stanav]

Having had an SSD for the past year or so... it's barely worth it... they still have realiability issues (I had to have mine swapped out three times in a 4 month period)... and they have a limited Write cycle lifetime before failure... in other words, don't do a lot of heavy writing to it (unless you don't care about your database, don't put the DB on an SSD)... reading from it is fast and simple... if you're doing write-once read-lots, then they are great (for like streaming music, video, etc)...

What I've got now seems to be a really ideal setup:
a 125GB SSD with Windows installed, this is the boot drive, and where most of my applications go... I then have a secondary 500GB standard HD where all my data, databases, websites, other applications and my heavy read/write processing happens. Win 7 64-bit with 8GB RAM... so far, I'm loving it...

-tg

Yeah, using SSD as boot drive and HDD for data storage seems to be the norm. I too use this set up in all of my desktop and I am quite happy with it ... With laptops, it's another story though. Many laptops don't have an mSata slot (or already being utilized) and don't have room for a 2nd HDD. I've tried those hybrid HDDs some of my laptops but didn't very happy with the performance and eventually I switched to SSD... Just have to remind myself to do backups more frequently...

[techgnome]

I forgot to mention that my setup is a laptop. In my case I dumped the DVD drive.... never used it anyways... so the SSD is in the main HD bay, and the standard HD is sitting in the old DVD bay. And if that's STILL not enough, I have a USB 500GB drive I use for backup.

I've heard mixed results on hybrid SSDs... apparently the key to their performance is to use it long enough with the monitor tool for it to get an idea on how to organize the data and what gets shuttled off to the SSD portion of the hybrid.

-tg

[Nightwalker83]

4GB is the least amount of memory I would have. The laptop I use for development has 16GB of RAM. I think you are right in upgrading both. With the SSD, you will pay more, but it is fast. RAM is inexpensive, buy as much as your box will hold.

My pc which, I mainly use for gaming has the same amount of RAM.

[szlamany]

@dee-u - what did you end up getting?

[Niya]

SSDs really speed up your PC. I had one a while back but it went bad in less than a month. As a matter of fact, we had three of them for each of our PCs here and all went bad within a week of each other so I'd worry about reliability. Of course we had PNY SSDs which is not a big player in the solid state market or the HD market as far as I know.

[dee-u]

@dee-u - what did you end up getting?

For now I just had the RAM since I'm quite worried about the SSD's if it is not that reliable, it would have been fine if I have 2 harddrive slots so I can just use the SSD for the OS and programs and still use the HD for saving the files.

[Niya]

Well if it means anything we do currently have a Samsung SSD running in a laptop PC that's been going great for several months now.

[dilettante]

SSDs are not a good thing to use with Windows Vista or earlier, since it doesn't make use of the TRIM command and will wear the SSD out far too soon.

Even Win7 doesn't use TRIM properly, and won't use it on PCI-Express SSDs anyway.

You almost need to go to Android 4.3 or another alternative OS to get good support for SSDs.


A lot of people are fooling themselves wasting money on SSDs that won't last long.

[Niya]

You almost need to go to Android 4.3 or another alternative OS to get good support for SSDs.

Well that's not gonna happen here, SSD or not.

[techgnome]

I've got an SSD and a traditional HDD in my system... they work great... the SSD is the primary drive, where Windows is installed, allowing it to boot fairly quickly... it's also where VS and all my other major apps are installed. I then have a secondary half-terabyte drive where all my data and databases and everything else is located.

A lot of the problems with SSDs were early on, I think they're much more stable than they were a few years ago. I had one in my personal system that went out in 6 months... but the ones I've had since are still running just fine. the thing to remember is that they are basically banks of memory chips, and so do have a limited write-lifetime before they fail... OK, it's supposed to be extraordinarily high... but it is something to consider.

-tg

[Niya]

The drives we had certainly didn't wear out. They were barely out of the box.

[dilettante]

The Hot/Crazy Solid State Drive Scale

Basically SSDs are like narcotic drugs. Good for some things when properly administered and usage is monitored, but addictive enough to kill millions through abuse.

[Niya]

Speaking of this. I just got a new Kingston SSD yesterday. I haven't installed it yet but I'm going to before this weekend is up. Hopefully, it doesn't turn out to be a disaster like the last set of SSDs we had.