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If you use SSD like T5, does that allow better usage of RAM?
- Thread starter levmc
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The only effect it has is speeding up swapping if you run out of memory and start using the swap file.
Check out this to determine if you are in need of more RAM. Make sure you are doing what you typically would be doing with your Mac to get an accurate measure on your memory pressure:
If you are always in the green, then adding an SSD wouldn't have much of an impact on RAM or page swapping.
The difference would be how noticeable the page swapping would be due to different boot drive speeds.
If your computer with the Fusion Drive is utilizing a lot of RAM already and it is page swapping a lot, then there could be a difference in speed in which a Fusion Drive page swaps versus a pure SSD.
Although, the way Fusion Drives work, a small portion of the SSD storage is supposed to remain free as working storage, so a Fusion Drive could have little difference than a SSD for light page swapping.
Although, if the SSD portion of the Fusion Drive is mostly full, that could impact write speeds, so maybe there could be a difference, but probably not noticeable because I think the potential bottle neck would be on the read side of page swapping (moving from the SSD to RAM), not write (moving from RAM to the SSD). Anyone else think that makes sense?
Check if your Mac needs more RAM in Activity Monitor
Use Activity Monitor on your Mac to see if memory is being used efficiently and if you need more memory (RAM).
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If you are always in the green, then adding an SSD wouldn't have much of an impact on RAM or page swapping.
No. AFAIK, the OS does not treat an SSD different than a Fusion Drive when it comes to RAM management.
The difference would be how noticeable the page swapping would be due to different boot drive speeds.
If you are page swapping, going from a HDD to a SSD would have a huge impact.
If your computer with the Fusion Drive is utilizing a lot of RAM already and it is page swapping a lot, then there could be a difference in speed in which a Fusion Drive page swaps versus a pure SSD.
Although, the way Fusion Drives work, a small portion of the SSD storage is supposed to remain free as working storage, so a Fusion Drive could have little difference than a SSD for light page swapping.
Although, if the SSD portion of the Fusion Drive is mostly full, that could impact write speeds, so maybe there could be a difference, but probably not noticeable because I think the potential bottle neck would be on the read side of page swapping (moving from the SSD to RAM), not write (moving from RAM to the SSD). Anyone else think that makes sense?
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No, it does not. There is absolutely no correlation between the speed of your permanent storage and the efficiency of the operating systems working memory usage algorithm.