12GB RAM Too Much?

[genwarfare]

what do SSDs do and why are they so small in size? can someone explain their purpose or how they work to me?
i see lots of great reviews and people keep mentioning them but i cant figure out why.

do they just act like a regular hard drive that you would store larger/more demanding programs on?
or is it some sort of passive device that helps speed up your system? (i really am clueless )

and what you said about the triple channel memory, using either 6GB or 12GB, does that rely entirely on weather the specs say triple or double channel? as in: putting 8gb of ram in a triple channel motherboard doesnt make any sense?

[James]

what do SSDs do and why are they so small in size? can someone explain their purpose or how they work to me?
i see lots of great reviews and people keep mentioning them but i cant figure out why.

do they just act like a regular hard drive that you would store larger/more demanding programs on?
or is it some sort of passive device that helps speed up your system? (i really am clueless )

and what you said about the triple channel memory, using either 6GB or 12GB, does that rely entirely on weather the specs say triple or double channel? as in: putting 8gb of ram in a triple channel motherboard doesnt make any sense?

If you want a really comprehensive overview of SSD technology, what it's good for, and what you should look for in an SSD, try reading the Anandtech SSD anthology.

If you just want a quick overview, SSD's are solid state storage devices. This gives them multiple benefits:
- Near zero access times compared to mechanical hard drives.
- Insanely high random access speeds compared to mechanical hdd's.
- Much higher transfer speeds than mechanical HDD's.
- Much lower power consumption than regular HDD's.
- The ability to offer more I/Ops than an entire RAID array of normal HDD's

They are best suited for any kind of data that needs lots of random access, large amounts of I/O, and large amounts of bandwidth for reading/writing. This generally defines an Operating system. The majority of people who have SSD's have their OS and primary applications on them, and then all of their data and secondary apps on a normal hdd. This majority includes myself after picking up one of the new Intel X25-M 80GB SSD's.

[Altvamp]

The above is absolute rubbish, just sales spiel to try to get you to buy it, They use the same interface then the access times are the same, you would do better to look at some of the benchmarking comparisons than the retailers sales pitch. The only way you will get that kind of performance is to use PCI-e slot drives like the revodrive.
Inidentally i bought a 30GB SSD some time ago and never used it as it was actually much slower than my Hitachi Ultrastar drives, combined with the fact that data is impossible to recover from it. I have read many people say that they fitted an SSD and their system was faster booting, and i wonder if this is because they just did a clean install of Windows rather than the fact the drive is faster, I am almost certain it will be.

[Nater]

what do SSDs do and why are they so small in size? can someone explain their purpose or how they work to me?
i see lots of great reviews and people keep mentioning them but i cant figure out why.

do they just act like a regular hard drive that you would store larger/more demanding programs on?
or is it some sort of passive device that helps speed up your system? (i really am clueless )

and what you said about the triple channel memory, using either 6GB or 12GB, does that rely entirely on weather the specs say triple or double channel? as in: putting 8gb of ram in a triple channel motherboard doesnt make any sense?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive

And what do you mean 'specs say double or triple channel'? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, you either have 3/6 DIMMs (tri-channel) or you have 2/4 (dual channel).

[ua549]

And what do you mean 'specs say double or triple channel'? That doesn't make a lot of sense to me, you either have 3/6 DIMMs (tri-channel) or you have 2/4 (dual channel).

The specs make the difference, not the number of memory slots because there are boards with more than 6 slots. My desktop board has 8 memory slots and my server board has 18 memory slots. I've owned boards with 2, 4, 12 and 16 memory slots.

IMO one should not make a generalization based on the number of memory slots since there are boards with 1, 2, 3 and 4 memory channels.

[Nater]

The specs make the difference, not the number of memory slots because there are boards with more than 6 slots. My desktop board has 8 memory slots and my server board has 18 memory slots. I've owned boards with 2, 4, 12 and 16 memory slots.

IMO one should not make a generalization based on the number of memory slots since there are boards with 1, 2, 3 and 4 memory channels.

There are not any boards that any of us would be buying with four memory channels. FB-DIMM could do a pseudo four channel, but not really. The northbound and southbound bus widths were asymmetrical. We're not talking about 2S/4S boards here, that's not what the guy is looking at. Not that FB-DIMM really matters for any new system anymore, the technology is dead. intel has decided it better to go back to standard registered DIMMs on two socket servers and motherboard bound memory buffers for Beckton.

'xxx channel' isn't a memory spec either, it's a northbridge and/or CPU specification. Not to mention I wasn't referring to the number of DIMM slots, but the number of DIMMs in a kit. A triple channel kit is going to have three or six DIMMs, a dual channel kit will have two or four.

Using the memory slot number to determine dual/triple channel would also apply with nearly every consumer motherboard manufactured over the past five years excluding early build low-end X58 motherboards and Gigabyte's P55 UD6 with six memory slots.

[Altvamp]

what do SSDs do and why are they so small in size? can someone explain their purpose or how they work to me?
i see lots of great reviews and people keep mentioning them but i cant figure out why.

do they just act like a regular hard drive that you would store larger/more demanding programs on?
or is it some sort of passive device that helps speed up your system? (i really am clueless )

Hi,
SSD stands for Solid State Device, basically it is flash memory, it does not have any mechanical parts like a conventional hard drive.
There was a lot of excitement and talk of how much faster they are than mechanical hard drives when they were first released into the general market but in reality they are unlikely to be any faster than there mechanical counterparts. Tests i have seen done on Laptop drives proved that most mechanical drives were faster overall, and the high spec mechanical drives out perform the SSD types easily.
They would be faster if they were not limited by the SATA interface, but due to the way they operate and latency they perform about the same overall as a standard cheap hard drive, many of them are also not performing up to the manufacturers spec with many falling below average of an equivalent mechanical drive, so if you are thinking of spending money on these for improved performance forget it!
There however pro's and cons, the ones I'm aware of and important ones are:
Pros:
1. They use less power (saving on energy)
2. They don't get very hot like mechanical drives (Because they use less power and have no moving parts)
3. They are not easily damaged by shock.
4. They don't make any noise
5. They are small and light

Cons:
1. It is practically impossible to perform successful data recovery on them due to the way data is written on them, So although there is much less chance of data loss with SSD, should data loss or corruption occur it's unlikely you will be able to recover it.

and what you said about the triple channel memory, using either 6GB or 12GB, does that rely entirely on weather the specs say triple or double channel? as in: putting 8gb of ram in a triple channel motherboard doesnt make any sense?

Yes, putting 8GB in a three slot triple board does not make any sense, but as far as i understand it if you do this then 3 of your Dimms will work as triple channel and the other will be used as single channel if the other three are full - but this may depend on your board/processor, in some cases it may stop the triple channel feature from being used at all.