memory - what would better improve a notebook's performance, a 4GB DDR3 or a 100GB SSD

03
2014-05
  • Daniel

    I am using thinkpad E430 with win8 as my primary workstation. The notebooks bears lots of computing and programming tasks and I need to alternate between vmware guest os(linux) and my host win8 quite often. As a result, I am very concerned about the speed of the computer(especially in VMWare).

    I currently have a 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD, but I can still feel significant latency when alternating working os in VMWare, and hence want to invest more in the hardware. That said, which of the two options, adding a 4GB DDR3 or a 100GB SSD, would better facilitate the notebook in my case? Thanks

    • Answers
  • Keltari

    Its hard to say for sure. Moving to 8GB of RAM from 4 will yield noticeable improvement as you will not be paging as much. However, a SSD will also increase speed in that your machine will be paging, but it will be able to read and write faster. Also, compiling large programs will be faster.

    Why not get both? If cost is the issue, I would go with the RAM.

  • mikebabcock

    It depends on what you're doing. If you run a large application or two and don't use a lot of data constantly (such as photo editing), the RAM will make a bigger difference. If you're waiting for the disk (the light is blinking) while you're lagging, you want the SSD.

  • Mogget

    I believe that since you already have 4GB of RAM, you will experience any noticeable increase in general performance if you add another 4GB of RAM. However if you swap out the hard drive, you will see a general performance boost whenever you are reading a lot of data from the drive. Examples are when you boot your computer and when starting larger software packages like Photoshop, the Office suit and similar.

    In addition, by swapping out a rotating disk with an SSD, you get a less noisy laptop and can get better battery performance since the laptop doesn't have to worry about spinning up and down the drives platters.

    Note that I put to ground that you do not use software that has extreme memory requirements. In that case you would of course get better performance by adding more RAM to the system.


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  • Questioner

    I have just build a new computer and I acquired a SSD(64gb) for faster read/write performance. I also have a much larger SATA drive. I was wondering if putting the operating system on one or the other will make a performance difference with a program I am running that is moderately heavy in reading and writing (a number of small files(~15mb) that add up to about 4gb). The files will be kept on the SSD, but I did not know if it would also be better to have the OS on the SSD (linux) as well. Thanks for any input.


    • Related Answers
  • Isaac Rabinovitch

    It's probably best to put both the OS and your program on the SSD. An SSD is much, much quicker than a conventional disk drive.

  • buttercup

    For the program itself I don't think it is that important where the OS itself is. It is more important where the swap space is, perhaps. The running parts of OS are in RAM anyway.

    And then, you would want to put swap space on SSD, obviously.