RAM is very important for SSD's?

[UBS28]

Writes are extremely bad for SSD's. So it seems for optimum use of your SSD, it's best to have atleast 16 gb of RAM to avoid any possible page-out? (Sometimes I do get pages out with 8 gb of RAM, but it's not much)

 

[B...]

Writes are not "extremely bad". SSDs just have certain amount of writes in their lifetime. If you are getting GBs of page outs, you need more RAM. Sometimes is not enough to definitely warrant more RAM--the SSD can deal with a few page outs.

 

[robvas]

The last thing MBA or Retina owners complain about is their 'SSD wearing out'.

"Rollerblades for Christmas"

 

[ColdCase]

SSDs are provisioned to last 5-6 years at typical user/workstation use rates. Because of the sophistication of controller memory management, including wear being distributed, high wear symptoms you may see is simply a reduction in write speeds (many disks throttle data after a specified number of write cycles) or less storage space being available as the controller marks bad gates out of service. Its not catastrophic as it may be when a sector goes bad on rotational media. In other words, unlike rotational media, when the host writes to the same sector and address over and over again the same memory gates are not being used. Fresh ones are continually rotated in more or less. The SSD controller/memory manager keeps track of which gates are wear and which ones are fresher. Wear is much more of a concern in the high capacity MLC technology used in consumer grade SSDs than the lower capacity high speed SLC used in enterprise SSDs.

It is an electronic component, however. My experience has been that once you get past infant mortality, SSDs seem to last forever (don't overheat them). For 24/7 server high transaction rate environment there may be controller pathologies that rear their ugly head.. and data throttling.. but the IT guys deal with those. A MBP is not going to see that stress.

 

[Menge]

To more directly answer to the OP:
I'd have as much RAM as I need in order to have 0 page-outs on my daily usage and decrease the number of unnecessary writes to my SSD.

Some will say that you don't have to – and you really don't. But I'd do whatever I could to increase the life of my SSD. RAM is cheap! 8GB is under 60USD on B&H and 16GB is under 140USD!

 

[ColdCase]

I agree that enough RAM to eliminate page outs is best for performance, SSDs are much slower memory than RAM. Over time, page outs can not be completely eliminated, but minimizing is good.