New Desktop Advice Please

jamesd

OnlyTheBestWillDo said:

You're telling someone who checked task manager before posting on a 4GB RAM machine that what they saw is nonsense. There's swapping and at the moment I have 4.3 gigabytes committed. With me using nothing but a browser I'm seeing around 100 kilobytes per second of reads and 2.4 megabytes per second of writes from System. Process Monitor shows that I'm using about 5% of the space I've allocated to page files and at maximum since last boot used just under 20% of it.

I'll just suggest to you that "Committed" doesn't mean that it is actually in use. 

Committed means that it's been allocated to a program and space has been reserved for it in the swap file. The writes and reads are really happening and the percentage of space used is the actual amount of space used. If it's been allocated and space set aside for it, it's in use and that resource is not available for other uses. The effect might be small if the program never accesses it or the accesses and consequent page fault rate are infrequent but there's still work to do in allocating the space, possibly including expanding the swap file size.

Your suggestion is not without merit if there is ample disk space and the memory is not ever accessed once it's been allocated but the read and write rates suggest otherwise. Whether this will matter in a specific case depends on the availability of free space and the overall page fault rate for the system as a whole.

For others, a page fault is what you get when a program tries to access a RAM page that's been swapped out of RAM and now only exists on disk. The OS notices that, loads the page into RAM, probably after kicking another page out, then returns control back to the program. Low page fault rates are not going to be noticeable but as the become more frequent they can start to have a serious effect due to the extra disk I/O cost.

Lest you think that low impact is no impact, attempting to allocate around 60 gigabytes of RAM on a 16 gigabyte RAM machine took around half an hour before the bug I was looking to reproduce - exhausting the 16 bit Windows RAM handles unnecessarily, thereby crashing the database server - showed up. That'd be utterly unacceptable in the production case I was reproducing. While home users will never normally do that, it helps to illustrate that there is a cost in the allocation process even if the RAM isn't getting used after allocation.

OnlyTheBestWillDo

jamesd said:

OnlyTheBestWillDo said:

Under £40 and as good as the device will ever get. Spending £100 won't bring superior performance nor convenience.

As Seagate explains in moderate detail in SSD Over-Provisioning And Its Benefits, more space can be expected to result in faster non-sequential performance, with even just 30% over-provisioning expected to produce a doubling of random write throughput on a typical SSD.

In general, it's good to have a fair bit of free space on SSDs. greyteam1959 might do that by storing bulk data and archival things on the spinning disk and keeping the more frequently accessed or time-sensitive things on the SSD as well as having a nicely sized SSD.

Similarly, it's nice and convenient just to clone and to have everything on a relatively fast SSD if desired, particularly given the fairly low cost of that convenience compared to the original buy another computer plan.

Net result is that the bigger SSD is going to improve both speed and convenience and of course greyteam1959 has recognised at least the convenience benefit already in going for the larger drive.

Rather than spending £100 to upgrade a 13 year old Intel E8400 CPU device; I would have purchased an Optiplex 3050 with an i5-6500 CPU that would far outperform the E8400 with a 1 TB SSD.

As I stated, you are only trying to justify what in in all actuality, a waste of money.

getmore4less

Still don't know the machine or motherboard.

Mine of that era,  SSD is limited by SATA 2 interface 

getmore4less

I used a visualization tool(wiztree) to see where my space was going on a 320GB.

The 250GB SSD is touching 90GB with plenty that could be deleted or moved to the old 320 that sits at 165

OP opened with  Just used for basic internet / videos / email / Skype etc 

media can stay on the HDD the rest won't be taking up a lot of room.

jamesd

getmore4less said:

Still don't know the machine or motherboard.

Mine of that era,  SSD is limited by SATA 2 interface 

Would be nice to know but probably won't change the SSD then RAM answer.

Sequential reads almost certainly will be limited by the SATA interface. Writes maybe not much, depends on the particular workload. Data transfer for writes will be slowed a bit but it's the amount of unallocated space that might or might not hurt the writes more. If there's plenty of free space, due to overprovisioning and Windows optimise doing regular TRIMs then there's more chance that the interface will make visible difference but it seems unlikely that it will given the intended use.

I wonder, do you notice or did you notice the on-drive vs transfer rate limits when there's plenty of unallocated and TRIM'd space on the drive? Likely to be hard to notice but I'm wondering if you did find it noticeable compared to more full.