markz said:
Anyone know if installing new RAM helps the system out, or does the RAM just get wiped when you turn off the system?
If you want to improve the performance of your PC then getting a SSD drive installed (if you got a mechanical drive currently) absolutely crushes total end user performance experience speed gains then compared to a RAM upgrade.
A SSD drive will allow your CPU/RAM to access your data dare I say on average 500 to 1,000 times faster.
*edit* I forgot to mention of course you install MS Windows on the SSD drive. And use your larger mechanical disk drive for multimedia/videos files etc, its access to system OS files etc that slows your desktop to a dog on a purely mechanical HD setup..
The best way in layman terms I describe an SSD upgrade over ram is to say "sure you can upgrade to say 12GB ram, or you can
effectively upgrade to 512GB ram when you install a 512GB SSD drive."
http://www.howtogeek.com/194750/its-time-why-you-need-to-upgrade-to-an-ssd-right-now/
I told my brother time and time again how SSDs trump RAM upgrades in PCs but he called me the other day and said he just upgraded his RAM in his computer and it hasn't helped much while hes still sitting on that old mechanical hard drive! I couldn't believe my ears, some people still aren't getting the message..Below here I decided to try and give more detail on the differences of performance that SSD can bring...
The core of the performance difference is
random access speed. Your average fresh windows 10 installation of just OS files is going to be at least around
15gb and only get bigger. And its all spread over
10s of thousands of files...
Nothing can predict what is needed and it can't be all cached, so when a mechanical hard drive has to access these files it can only possibly do it at l
ess then 1MB/second.
Mechanical hard drives will always have lousy random access performance because they physically have a little arm that moves up and down the disc a bit like a vinyl record player and they can only ever move that arm so fast..
Shown here on Anandtechs excellent performance test of typical
4k random read access in MB/sec you can see the mechanical hard drives do not break even a lousy
1mb/sec its in fact in the mere
kilobytes/sec (kb) while SSD drives were over 50mb/sec (latest SSDs are now even double that).
When its all boiled together the performance difference in these work loads for a SSD vs mechanical hard drive can end up being a 1,000 times faster performance from your SSD especially when you consider the amount of extra time you save sitting in front of your PC waiting for it over a years time.
Sure you can dig up a benchmark showing
sequential read performance of a mechanical hard drive at over 100mb/sec but its useless
misleading information because all the data is perfectly sequential and this is
not how data is stored for your OS (operating system files),
random access speed has always been what its all about when evaluating true storage speed.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2738/25
You wont find many benchmarks like this mainly because Anand was a special guy and most other tech review sites only copy his insights and even fail at it miserably. (Anand now works for Apple) its also because typically hardware sites benchmark hardware against very similar products so you don't see the comparison.
You can see here the 3 mechanical hard drives on the bottom of this graph failing to visually register a score, as there in the
kilobytes/sec.
We all have noticed how things get slower over time with our PC this is due to many factors, one particular factor is when you get security updates from Microsoft etc, they will overwrite those same OS files typically with slightly large files so the file doesn't fit in the same sectors on the disk and ends up being placed in multiple different areas of your drive which makes the problem worse for your mechanical drive but a comparatively minor problem for your SSD.