Should I get 8 or 16 GB RAM (13" Mid 2014)?

[konradsa]

hey i'm about to buy a MBP 13''..

I was looking at the 15'' before but I ideally need the HDD space (512GB over the real estate of the 15'') .


So, my uses are really all at the same time: dropbox, ical, safari, chrome, facetime, itunes, ibooks, a few files open to preview, transmission, evernote, MS word + Power point, reminders app and pages + steam.

is 8GB enough to have all those open and seemless?

Before with HDDs, I'd definitely opt for the 16GB but I'm new to flash memory and SSDs... am i going to see much/any benefit from 16GB RAM?

I have a gaming PC for any heavy stuff already.

From what you listed above, 8GB should be sufficient. You would not get much benefit out of 16GB.

 

[simonsi]

I would not allow swapping if you have an SSD. SSD have a finite number of writes...

HDDs wear out too, and for the volumes we are talking about it is a comparable issue - ie not one to worry about in normal usage. You can do the maths but personally it would take some 25+yrs to wear my Flash out at that rate, hugely longer for the cMBP SSD.

Hardly an issue.

 

[yjchua95]

I would not allow swapping if you have an SSD. SSD have a finite number of writes...

But by that time you reach that amount of writes, your system would've been toast.

In this experiment (http://techreport.com/review/26523/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-casualties-on-the-way-to-a-petabyte) the MLC-based Samsung 840 Pro 256GB hit the 1 petabyte write mark without any degradation in performance yet (it's an MLC based drive).

The Samsung blade SSDs (not sure about the SanDisk ones) used in the rMBPs, MBAs and iMacs are based off the XP941, which are also MLC based.

So don't worry about it. It's pretty misleading to state that.