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OK, buying a new Desktop PC for software development.

Assumptions

  • Boot up time not too important. Only need to do it once or twice a day. Not a big deal.
  • Lots about multitasking, running VMs, etc.
  • I7 processor
  • 6 GB/s SATA HD
  • 16 GB RAM

What's a better use of $250:

  • Upgrading from 500 GB SATA (6 GB/s) to equally fast 128GB SSD.
  • Upgrading from 16 GB RAM to 32 GB RAM.

(These are all Dell components and they do't give any make/model names for them.)

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2
  • Shopping/purchasing recommendation are considered off-topic for SU. But in general, SSD's will help boot time much more than RAM.
    – Ƭᴇcʜιᴇ007
    Jun 13, 2013 at 20:13
  • The real answer is... Whichever one you would benefit more from in your specific, particular case. If you're not worried about boot-up time, then go with RAM, considering it's hundreds of times faster than a SSD, and doesn't have a limited number of writes.
    – Breakthrough
    Jun 13, 2013 at 20:48

1 Answer 1

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Depends on whether you are already running out of ram. Ram only provides capacity, and as such if you already have plenty, you don't need any more. Windows controls its ram IO cache automatically, so you are not likely to gain noticeable performance from having more cache room, unless you are already running low. but you should have 8GB ram on most modern boxes anyway.

SSD however will improve your IO access time significantly, so it is a mean improvement regardless of your current state. I'd go with it. you must have a pretty fast systembus to actually process data at Sata6 speeds though, so make sure your motherboard and ram support it.

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