Would it be worth it to upgrade my RAM and HDD to an SSD in my laptop?

adams215

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May 1, 2014
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Currently I have 4 gigs of RAM running at 1066 MHz and a 1 TB 7200 rpm HDD. I am debating on whether I should upgrade the RAM in my laptop and whether I should install an SSD because I am not sure how much of a performance boost I would get, especially concerning the RAM. When I look in my task manager when my computer is under the normal workload for what I do (and sometimes even when it's under my normal workload), I see that over 75% of my RAM is being used most of the time and that leads me to believe I should upgrade. However, under a normal-heavier than normal load I see that 65-70%+ of my CPU is being used as well. So will it benefit greatly from installing 8 gigs of RAM running at 1600 MHz along with an SSD or will the CPU keep me from seeing a large difference in speeds?
 
Solution
Ram, maybe. SSD definitely. Best thing you can do for a laptop is an ssd. Night and day difference. But if you do upgrade ram, you can also use it to cache the ssd and speed it up even further.
1066 or 1866? How many sticks? How many dimm slots has the laptop got? If you can get identical ram and there's enough slots then go for it. 8GB will give you a bit more headroom - store more processes and more webpages

Just format the ssd to wipe all its old data then you can install the OS on it. This willat least halve boot up time.
 

Dblkk

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Ram, maybe. SSD definitely. Best thing you can do for a laptop is an ssd. Night and day difference. But if you do upgrade ram, you can also use it to cache the ssd and speed it up even further.
 
Solution

mrmez

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IMHO, 4Gb should be plenty until you start seeing 100% usage, there's no point.

As for an SSD, it's the best money you can ever spend on an upgrade.
Got my first SSD ~4 years ago, and today my work, home and laptop each have one.
 

adams215

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I figured upgrading to an SSD would help. I was more skeptical as to how much the RAM would help. Using it to cache the SSD would definitely be a plus along with having more headroom.
 

Dblkk

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Yea, toms did an article about a year or so back reguarding ssd longevity and amounts of ram. They found that when they doubled the ram, windows needed to write less cache data on the drive itself, hence saving the life of the ssd. Nowhere does it show or can you really prove how much life it saved, but I for one would rather have more ram since its cheap, use some to cache the ssd, use the rest for windows to write on and save my ssd. That's why every laptop/pc I own I max ram, and fill it as full of ssd goodness as I can.

Perfect example, I just bought two asus g750m laptops. Filled each with 32 gb crucial 1866 ram, and 2x Samsung 840 evo 1tb ssd's. Going to remove the dvd drive and get a third 2.5bay out of that, and add another ssd in there as well.

I only use so much ssd space because I edit videos, between a few hours of footage, once you start pulling apart audio and video and adding effects, it really eats up space quick. I was using a bunch of 256gb usb 3.0 thumb drives, but the 130mbps was limiting my system.