Experiment: Can Adding RAM Improve Your SSD's Endurance?

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A minor hardware upgrade can have a major impact. Adding RAM to your PC may help cut back on writes to your SSD, potentially increasing its lifespan. In fact, our benchmarks reveal up to a 63% reduction with 16 GB of DDR3 memory compared to 4 GB.

Results: First With 4 GB, Then With 16 GB Of RAM

Making that jump to 16 GB yields a quantifiable improvement. Writes to the SSD drop notably after quadrupling RAM capacity. The amount of data declines by around 28% in 3ds Max (393.4 MB with 4 GB RAM versus 281.3 MB with 16 GB RAM).

The other two benchmarks show even greater improvements: Photoshop CS6 writes 45.4 percent less data, while Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 writes almost 64% less information to the SSD.