4 ms·

Yes, but the RAM is mostly for the gaming. It means I can easily switch between snappy desktop orrr burning a bunch on minecraft worlds and clients or whatever

Yes, but the RAM is mostly for the gaming. It means I can easily switch between snappy desktop orrr burning a bunch on minecraft worlds and clients or whatever random game is out there. So. A lot more useful than an SSD ;) Also I'd be concerned about any SSD you can get for that price. And, frankly, you don't need that much RAM to have a pleasant desktop experience. Most of that is just for the gaming. Just a gig or two of file cache for the hot stuff. Which is what your OS usually does anyway. The tower my workplace bought me is also spinning rust, and they for some reason put an enormous amount of RAM in it too. Only 5 gigs are actually being used for caching. The OS can't figure out what to do with the rest after having, I suppose loaded browser (few hundred megs), VMWare, OpenOffice etc. Even if I was running something more bloaty than Mate I doubt I could find a way to burn more than another gigabyte :)

horsawlarway 5y ago
I mean... at the risk of asking a loaded question - have you tried an ssd? Because, I'm also spoiled on RAM so I don't have to pick, but if I haaad to pick - I'd take a machine with 8gb of RAM and an SSD over 32gb of RAM and an HDD almost any day (actually - literally any day except when I'm running our full service stack at work, which needs about 12gb of RAM to be workable) If I have a bunch of media - sure, throw it on a spinning 2tb drive or something. I'm not saying don't use cheap storage, I'm just saying... try the SSD. It costs about the same as coffee for the week.
- capitainenemo 5y ago
  Yep. All the laptops in the house are SSD. I really haven't noticed much of a difference, sorry. Everything is linux too, but I find it hard to believe that would matter. I mean, NTFS is a notoriously slow file system (Hedgewars, Firefox and Minecraft all had to rearchitect to handle its horrendous handling of many small files), but the reasons for it I think would not change that much with SSD. The thing is. How would you really notice a difference after first load of an app? SSD, spinning rust, linux, everything is mem caching these days... It's really hard to tell unless you're actually memory constrained. It's quite likely that if I had to work on an enormous number of new files, I might notice something? But my software projects aren't like that - the games and videos are, but they wouldn't fit on an SSD anyway. That's why I have an 8 terabyte hard drive.
  - zozbot234 5y ago
    I agree about this. SSD leads to impressively fast boot/early load times, and it might help if you have to run workloads that stress both RAM and I/O, but other than that it doesn't really matter if you're running a proper OS. And you can put a swap file/partition on a spinning disk without worrying about endurance or having less space for files. So the performance argument goes both ways, and the extra storage space of spinning rust is very convenient.
  - horsawlarway 5y ago
    Alright, fair enough - we might just have fairly different workloads. I absolutely notice a pretty major difference. If you don't - hey, if it's not broken, don't fix it I guess.
    - capitainenemo 5y ago
      As I think about this, maybe it really is a Windows vs Linux thing. On raw read speeds, SSD is only about 2-3x faster than HDD. This is barely noticeable compared to the speed from RAM, or for almost anything you could reasonably launch. (Videos are huge, but those are basically streamed anyway) But, random access reads of many small files scattered across the disc, obviously SSD will do much better. Sequential reads (large files, non-fragmented filesystem) it's not so clear. Maybe it's simply that Linux, as well as being better at file caching and not wasting RAM, is also better at not being fragmented. Perhaps I have my OS filesystems to thank for my indifference. On that front I guess it's also saving me money by allowing me to enjoy ginormous cheap discs :)
      - capitainenemo 5y ago
        Hmmm another thought. Linux also (typically and traditionally) does a lot more library reuse thanks to the open source ecosystem. So, there's less DLL hell and fragmentation there. That could be another reason for my not noticing. Most of my system libraries that any random app needs are already loaded and ready for use after boot.

horsawlarway 5y ago

I mean... at the risk of asking a loaded question - have you tried an ssd? Because, I'm also spoiled on RAM so I don't have to pick, but if I haaad to pick - I'd take a machine with 8gb of RAM and an SSD over 32gb of RAM and an HDD almost any day (actually - literally any day except when I'm running our full service stack at work, which needs about 12gb of RAM to be workable) If I have a bunch of media - sure, throw it on a spinning 2tb drive or something. I'm not saying don't use cheap storage, I'm just saying... try the SSD. It costs about the same as coffee for the week.

capitainenemo 5y ago
Yep. All the laptops in the house are SSD. I really haven't noticed much of a difference, sorry. Everything is linux too, but I find it hard to believe that would matter. I mean, NTFS is a notoriously slow file system (Hedgewars, Firefox and Minecraft all had to rearchitect to handle its horrendous handling of many small files), but the reasons for it I think would not change that much with SSD. The thing is. How would you really notice a difference after first load of an app? SSD, spinning rust, linux, everything is mem caching these days... It's really hard to tell unless you're actually memory constrained. It's quite likely that if I had to work on an enormous number of new files, I might notice something? But my software projects aren't like that - the games and videos are, but they wouldn't fit on an SSD anyway. That's why I have an 8 terabyte hard drive.
- zozbot234 5y ago
  I agree about this. SSD leads to impressively fast boot/early load times, and it might help if you have to run workloads that stress both RAM and I/O, but other than that it doesn't really matter if you're running a proper OS. And you can put a swap file/partition on a spinning disk without worrying about endurance or having less space for files. So the performance argument goes both ways, and the extra storage space of spinning rust is very convenient.
- horsawlarway 5y ago
  Alright, fair enough - we might just have fairly different workloads. I absolutely notice a pretty major difference. If you don't - hey, if it's not broken, don't fix it I guess.
  - capitainenemo 5y ago
    As I think about this, maybe it really is a Windows vs Linux thing. On raw read speeds, SSD is only about 2-3x faster than HDD. This is barely noticeable compared to the speed from RAM, or for almost anything you could reasonably launch. (Videos are huge, but those are basically streamed anyway) But, random access reads of many small files scattered across the disc, obviously SSD will do much better. Sequential reads (large files, non-fragmented filesystem) it's not so clear. Maybe it's simply that Linux, as well as being better at file caching and not wasting RAM, is also better at not being fragmented. Perhaps I have my OS filesystems to thank for my indifference. On that front I guess it's also saving me money by allowing me to enjoy ginormous cheap discs :)
    - capitainenemo 5y ago
      Hmmm another thought. Linux also (typically and traditionally) does a lot more library reuse thanks to the open source ecosystem. So, there's less DLL hell and fragmentation there. That could be another reason for my not noticing. Most of my system libraries that any random app needs are already loaded and ready for use after boot.