Add More Memory To Extend The Life Of Your SSD

Add More Memory To Extend The Life Of Your SSD

Adding more RAM can sometimes improve your PC’s performance. In a series of tests, Tom’s Hardware found another possible benefit of adding more memory: a longer-lasting SSD and better disk I/O performance.

Photo by Dick Thomas Johnson.

Tom’s Hardware ran three memory-intensive tests on a system with 4GB of memory and then again with 16GB of memory. The results were impressive: an average 45% reduction in writes to the SSD and as much as 63% reduction.

Writes are what chip away at a solid-state drive’s endurance, so anything you can do to minimise them is going to stretch out the useful life of the NAND flash inside. In just the three quick little tests we ran using Autodesk’s 3ds Max 2012, Adobe Photoshop CS6, and Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, we saw an average reduction of 45%. That’s a lot of information living in main memory that never gets written to the SSD.

They conclude that:

In essence, there is no such thing as too much memory in a desktop with solid-state storage. The more RAM you add, the better off endurance looks, and the more I/O performance you get from the storage subsystem.

Unfortunately, memory prices have been on the rise recently, but they’re expected to fall or at least stay flat in the fourth quarter of this year.

Experiment: Can Adding RAM Improve Your SSD’s Endurance? [Tom’s Hardware via ITworld]


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