I would say 8 GB is more than enough for normal office tasks, surfing, music, and light pic edits - 4GB is the budget choice.
16 GB is for the enthusiast, and 32 overkill.
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8GB future proofs you for awhile. 4GB is good for everything up to and including gaming today, but will probably be too small in a couple of years. If you love running virtual machines you almost canāt get enough RAM, VMs are insatiable RAM hogs. Other than that you will generally know if you need 16+GB of RAM, like if youāre big on Photoshopping big-sensor camera RAWs or crunching through map data or runnning a bunch of modded Minecraft servers or something.
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Iāve only recently joined the SSD club, itās a very noticeable upgrade. My new gaming rig is booted and ready to go in under 10 seconds and loading bars are a distant memory.
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Nah, 4gb is a cheapo desktop computer for general use these days (Chrome is using over 1gb for me right now with about 16 tabs). 8 is only $35 more, and ought to mean you use virtual memory not all all or only for favorable purposes (stuff that isnāt actually being used). 16 will keep a fairly intense user from ever using virtual memory.
Recently games have been constrained by the 512mb memory on the consolesā¦ but that is now going up to around 6gb, So I think 8gb is going to be the standard for cross platform games very soon.
Oh, and there is actually a real downside to going up too far. To get quick suspend/resume space equal to ram must be reserved on the SSD. On a build where cost is a factor taking that big of a bite of SSD space can be troublesome.
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I guess with the new consoles coming out Iām going to have to upgrade my machine. I built it back in 2006 and it has not had a problem running a AAA game yet (although I did replace the GPU a couple of years ago when my old one died suddenly), with these new consoles out Iām going to have to build something to match (or really exceed, because people kind of suck at porting games). I guess 7 years is a decent run for a PC. The 2.4 Ghz C2D really doesnāt feel overly slow yet though, itās weird.
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I have SSDs in my big Linux desktop, my MythTV system (for booting / OS), and my Linux laptop. Fast booting is WONDERFUL.
I would like to put one in my lone Windows box, but I would want user directories and logging to go on a spinny disk, and that appears difficult in Windows 7.
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Trolling is a art.
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Sons both, to Abracadabra Alice.
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All remotely recent NT-based Windows OSes (I donāt know about actual NT3 and NT4; but certainly anything you actually care about) support mounting a volume either as a drive letter or under an empty directory on an existing NTFS filesystem.
Doing the surgery from within the OS you are trying to modify can be difficult(trivial if you want to create a new folder, or graft a giant disk under an empty āmy videosā folder or something like that); because c:\users and c:\windows, and any of its subdirectories, are not going to be empty and will not take kindly to any attempt to copy, delete, mount, and paste while in use. File locks all over the place, new files being created, the works.
If you can arrange to operate on the OS from a different boot volume, things get easier. Unfortunately, while Linux liveCDs are the obvious choice, they are unlikely to be able to do the āmount NTFS volume under directory on other NTFS volumeā trickery. Linux can read/write, even create/resize NTFS these days; but there are limits. Youāll probably have to work from another Windows instance (either just a quick minimal install on another disk, or a fairly full-featured WinPE boot). It definitely isnāt something that the installer makes easy, which is a pity, because all the technology is there, they just need to let you specify the disk layout in slightly more detail before the filesystem is populatedā¦
(This is actually sort of a habit at MS. Their technology is often better than they are given credit for; but they are amazing at totally failing to slap a halfway-usable interface on it and send it out to please users. Same thing with āVolume Shadow Copyā vs. āTime Machineā: āVolume Shadow Copyā was the sophisticated, powerful, versioning system built into recent Windows OSes at least as long as OSX has been alive, while āTime Machineā is kind of a nasty hack on top of the somewhat long-in-the-tooth HFS+; but all that barely matters, because one of the two is actually available for even dubiously clueful users to use, and the other is pretty much āAsk your IT Department, or be part of the IT departmentā.)
Why do they call them ādrivesā when thereās no driving going on in there? Itās just a circuit board with a bunch of NAND flash memory chips and an interface chip.
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Why a drive? The real answer is ādonāt ask, thatās just what we geeks call mass storage devices. You can call it anything you like if you donāt mind taking more time and/or people not understanding youā¦ā
My machineās got a small (16G) flash drive in it running as a cache. Definitely improves boot speed. Iāve thought about swapping that out for a larger flash drive, but thereās an issue here ā while flash drives are fast and shock resistant, they can WEAR OUT with repeated writes. Yes, you get a fair number of cycles. Yes, the drivers used these days try to distribute wear across the flash memory. But Iām still not convinced I want to use flash for anything but āread-mostlyā data, and Windows isnāt really set up to let you carve that off easily into a separate drive or partition. (And Iām not quite ready to go 100% Linux; I have a software investment Iām not willing to give up until thereās something at least as good for the Linux world.)
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Hell yes. My Retina MBP came with 8GB RAM/512GB SSD. Fastest computer Iāve ever used. Upgraded the older MBP with a 256GB SSD and it was like a brand new machine for my wife. My Media Center PC runs the OS off a 128GB SSD.
Because people were already accustomed to calling storage devices drives (e.g. ROM/optical drive, Flash/thumb drive, hard disk drive, floppy drive, tape drive, etc). The word connotes necessary information despite the (possible) lack of a mechanical motor or ādriveā (although electrons are still ādrivenā about the drive in some sense, though āpushed and pulledā might be more semantically correct).
English! Also note the word āliterallyā has come to mean āfigurativelyā. What an absurd and delightful language.
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Four years ago I went over 99% Linux with Win-XP in a VirtualBox VM for the rare times I need Win software/compatibility, and have never looked back.
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Just donāt by SSDās from OCZ. For one, their failure rates are astronomical and theyāre filing for bankruptcy, which means that new warranty is moot.
Crucial and Samsung all the way for quality. Those drives are incredible. My Crucial M4 128gb is still going strong.
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For work, definitely. For personal use, unfortunately, the Windows app Iām concerned about is a pro-level DAW (Sonar), and performance is critical; virtualization of that is not an option, though I may eventually set up a virtual Linux inside Windows and spend most of my time in that.
Still, that doesnāt address my concern about the read-mostly preference of SSDsā¦
I switched my laptop to SSD (from 7200) a few months ago. I love the difference itās made across the board. 500gb devices (and smaller) are sufficient for a lot of people, and are even more cost effective.
Same reason we dial numbers.
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Aah! Christmas time. Making me want things I donāt quite need. I have a good old laptop with a nearly full 1tb drive. I suppose I could clean it up and switch to an SSD. At least Iām not even thinking of getting a new laptop right?
Agreed about OCZ. But I wouldnāt put Crucial and Samsung in quite the same category. For SSDs, Crucialās (and Corsairās) reliability is good. Samsungās (and Intelās) reliability is excellent. Intel is too expensive, but Iām a fan of Samsungās recent drives.
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