Author Topic: ram: 8gig vs 16gig (Read 6752 times)

XEntity · **Reply #15 on:** August 09, 2011, 14:41:11 PM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #15 on: August 09, 2011, 14:41:11 PM

Seems to be the best price vs performance at the 120GB, and number 4 in the rankings on my previous link, for consumer SATA SSDs

Corsair CSSD-F120GB3-BK Force Series 3 120GB Solid State Drive - Read 550MB/s, Write 510MB/s

£146.98

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Corsair-CSSD-F120GB3-BK-Force-120GB-Solid/dp/tech-data/B0051A8T52/ref=de_a_smtd

Clock'd 0Ne · **Reply #16 on:** August 09, 2011, 14:47:32 PM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #16 on: August 09, 2011, 14:47:32 PM

With drives like this it really boils down to how much data you can chuck down the SATA pipeline, two SSDs in RAID is probably not going to max it out. In any case, the benefits of negligible seek time far outweigh any sequential read speed gains.

As I mentioned before, the 4-8kb random access read/write speeds seem far more improtant for the average user than overall big number sequential read/write speeds.

Last Edit: August 09, 2011, 14:51:12 PM by Clock'd 0Ne #187;

Edd · **Reply #17 on:** August 11, 2011, 18:36:03 PM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #17 on: August 11, 2011, 18:36:03 PM

I've been informed that even if you get an sh*t hot SSD and also have an old skool cool 2tb SATA drive, the bus speeds of the 2tb SATA drive will inhibit the SSD cause it's on the same bus?

I don't quite understand it myself, but I was tempted to get a 100gb Revodrive cause it was about £250 and then get an internal 2tb drive. OR get an internal SSD and use external drives as storage.

As for the 8gb v 16gb, i'm currently planning an upgrade and I'm getting 16gb, I figure you might as well get as much of them stuff as you can cause it's pretty cheap

Clock'd 0Ne · **Reply #18 on:** August 11, 2011, 21:26:41 PM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #18 on: August 11, 2011, 21:26:41 PM

I'm inclined to agree with Edd now on the RAM front. I've been running a 2Gb ramdisk for a few days now and set all my temp dir's to point to it, the PC is noticeably more responsive even though in theory I've only got 6Gb available for windows to play with.

16Gb with a 2/4Gb ramdisk and virtual memory turned off would be made of WIN, as they say.

bear · **Reply #19 on:** August 11, 2011, 21:34:21 PM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #19 on: August 11, 2011, 21:34:21 PM

I remember using RAM discs on 286:s

knighty · **Reply #20 on:** August 11, 2011, 22:58:24 PM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #20 on: August 11, 2011, 22:58:24 PM

nige.... what have you got on the ram disk ?

have you just put the disk cash / page file on there ?

or copied filed over to it manually ?

does the program you're useing auto save it to disk when you shutdown/restart ?

I've had the paging file turned off for years, and always assumed it would use the ram instead ? a few years ago nothing got close to using up 8gig for ram

p.s. my new m/b has some SATA2 ports... and then some seperare SATA3 ports... so there'd be no problems with other drivis slowing it down...

actually... I' guessing what it really means is if you have some SATA2 and SATA1 drives plugged into the same bus, they all go at SATA1 ? but SATA1 is still plenty fast anyway ? (faster than the drives anyway?) (ignoring the onboard disk cash/ram)

Last Edit: August 11, 2011, 23:00:07 PM by knighty #187;

Edd · **Reply #21 on:** August 11, 2011, 23:06:23 PM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #21 on: August 11, 2011, 23:06:23 PM

f**k knows. I didn't really understand it anyway. I mean If you plug your SSD into one SATA3 port and then your HDD's into another one? (like some mobo's name SATA ports 0 and 1, and then there is another one named M0 and M1) So you've got your SSD on port 0 and your HDD on port M0. I can't see how the HDD would slow the SSD down myself as it'd be on a completely different bus?

I don't understand it that well anymore. Bring back AGP and ISA slots and single speed RAM.

Clock'd 0Ne · **Reply #22 on:** August 11, 2011, 23:11:40 PM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #22 on: August 11, 2011, 23:11:40 PM

The difference with a page file and temp folder is that the page file is used in place of having physical ram for computational stuff, temp files is used by programs for tempory storage (e.g running program installations, zip file extraction, caching files, etc). Turning off the page file just means the system will not try to reserve physical ram by pretending the disk is physical memory, it will still use temporary files though.

I'm using the program I linked to earlier, it's free for ramdrives up to 4Gb big, any larger and they ask you to purchase (it's cheap though):

http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk
It does do restoring the ramdrive on reboots, I tested it before swapping all my temp folders over just in case

I've repointed my Temporary Internet Files folder to it, my Firefox temp files, my Photoshop scratch disk, WinRAR temp, and the windows 'common' temporary folders C:\windows\temp and C:\users\username\Appdata\local\Temp (which most other programs use for temp files)

I'm not sure what else I could point through it but that 2Gb fills quite quickly once I start using Photoshop. It's using between 200-500Mb right now just browsing and with Photoshop closed.

I will probably write up a guide on seting it up this weekend.

Bear in mind I have no idea how games will respond to this yet, I don't know how much they rely on temporary file space. I'm guessing very little though, swap file/physical ram is more the issue there I think.

Last Edit: August 11, 2011, 23:16:41 PM by Clock'd 0Ne #187;

Clock'd 0Ne · **Reply #23 on:** March 20, 2012, 22:49:38 PM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #23 on: March 20, 2012, 22:49:38 PM

I thought I'd bump this as the topic of memory requirements has come up in my upgrade advice thread

If you work, game or spend a good deal of time on your PC, when building a new system 8GB should be your minimum amount of RAM with 16GB preferable if you want a fast and responsive experience, especially if you don't have an SSD. Frankly, I'm making room for 32GB further down the line.

Visit Advanced System Settings (in Control Panel > System) > Advanced > Startup and Recovery and under System Failure change write debugging information to small memory dump or none to avoid needlessly writing a copy of your RAM to disk in the event of a crash.

Leave Windows pagefile turned on, especially if you have an SSD. Don't follow the old 2.5x RAM rule of thumb, this is garbage - Windows knows what its doing so leave it alone to manage page file size - in Windows 7 especially the algorithms for paging to disk are very clever indeed and designed to work in tandem with newer technology like SSDs. To top it off, MS in agreement:

Quote

Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well.

In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,
Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.
Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

This is what I am now considering gospel.

N.B. If you do have 16GB+ RAM you could also consider setting up a ramdrive for temp files as above as they are not stored in memory or the pagefile. It's much faster than writing to disk or solid state and cleans itself out whenever you reboot. YMMV but I've found it makes thing a bit snappier despite sacrificing some available RAM, so is only worth doing if you have lots of RAM to begin with.

knighty · **Reply #24 on:** March 20, 2012, 23:10:13 PM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #24 on: March 20, 2012, 23:10:13 PM

noooo, turn the page file off no matter what....... I haven't had one turned on in YEARS (since I first installed XP)

the one time (in all these years) I did need one... because some daft program started chewing up ram for no reason.... windows popped up a warning and turned it on for me.... then turned it off again when it wasn't needed any more !!!

plus.... I'd rather save those writes to the ssd tbh....

Clock'd 0Ne · **Reply #25 on:** March 20, 2012, 23:25:42 PM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #25 on: March 20, 2012, 23:25:42 PM

Those writes are inconsequential to the lifespan of an SSD really.

The gist of it seems to be that your system will feel more responsive initially but once you start using more programs is actually far worse off. In my situation, turning off the page file would be disasterous, I'd have no memory available for anything because Windows would be trying to keep literally everything in RAM - even stuff I'd loaded up on Monday and haven't touched since - leaving no room for current/new stuff. RAM is precious and needs managing. If you think you have enough then it sounds good in theory to turn it off, but the actual amount of RAM you will probably end up using is bound to be more than that (especially if you have <16Gb).

You don't really do much so probably don't notice, but I'd bet when you are gaming its not as fast/smooth as it could be if some of those textures from halfway back on the map you're playing were paged and not still being held in memory, or load times increased because it's still holding the data from the previous maps in memory. I don't know how you would quantify any of that, mind, but I'm going to trust Windows for a change in managing memory.

if you have enough RAM in the first place after all, you never will need to edge into virtual memory anyway, so it makes no sense to turn it off when its a good buffer

Last Edit: March 20, 2012, 23:27:58 PM by Clock'd 0Ne #187;

knighty · **Reply #26 on:** March 20, 2012, 23:38:24 PM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #26 on: March 20, 2012, 23:38:24 PM

nope, you're totally wrong

windows is better at managing ram than that

the vast majority of stuff in your ram isn't files you're working on/editing/changing, it's files which are identical to those on your disk... so they don't need to be in ram.... if you start getting low on ram it'll dump those files to disk.... or it'll dump them to disk if they haven't been used in a long time and you start using up ram fast... to make room for the stuff you're working on right now

hell... that was back in winxp days when I spent the time to read up on it properly (code, not opinions)... win 7 should be way ahead of that now

before I had the SSD... I could feel the delay as something I hadn't used in weeks (but was running in the background) loaded up
(a delay that wasn't there if I'd just used it recently)

Clock'd 0Ne · **Reply #27 on:** March 20, 2012, 23:41:32 PM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #27 on: March 20, 2012, 23:41:32 PM

Aren't you just arguing exactly what I said there, or has one of us misread the other? You're saying Windows is great at managing RAM/paging, which is exactly why I'm arguing the PF should be left on.

Task Manager says I have a 13/16Gb commit total, so basically I'm using twice as much memory as I have, 8Gb in paging. There's no way the machine would run well with VM switched off and I can see the slowdown from switching tasks and having to load all this extra data back in, especially when I go between my browser and Photoshop, that takes a good 5-10 seconds to open properly.

Last Edit: March 20, 2012, 23:52:50 PM by Clock'd 0Ne #187;

knighty · **Reply #28 on:** March 20, 2012, 23:57:17 PM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #28 on: March 20, 2012, 23:57:17 PM

Quote from: Clock'd 0Ne on March 20, 2012, 23:41:32 PM

Aren't you just arguing exactly what I said there, or has one of us misread the other? You're saying Windows is great at managing RAM/paging, which is exactly why I'm arguing the PF should be left on.

nope!

if you turn the paging file off, you force windows to use the ram, and it's good enough at handling ram to do everything you want / need

if you have the paging file turned on, it'll use it just because it's there.... because they made the OS for standard users who bought there computer at PC world and who have a gig or two of ram max

I don't run photoshop etc.... but I can have starcraft 2 running a multilayer game in the background, while I check email, brows the web and watch a video, un-rar a dozen files at 5+gig each and remote into the cctv at work at the same time.... without any slowdown... and i don't restart for weeks at a time

XEntity · **Reply #29 on:** March 21, 2012, 00:26:45 AM

Re: ram: 8gig vs 16gig

Reply #29 on: March 21, 2012, 00:26:45 AM

On my laptop I have noticed a serious improvement in turning the page file off! Now my laptop is running a fast SSD although the bus isn't capable of using it all and my RAM is 3GB so not sure if that makes a difference (i.e. page file being used more) But having the page file on, causes the system to actually run slow than having it off in my specific example and experience

News:

Author Topic: ram: 8gig vs 16gig (Read 6752 times)