Are there disadvantages to big memory in upgrades?

Question

I have a Lenovo T430 computer. The physical memory is 4GB DDR3 1600MHz. I work on big data analysis an often the memory is not sufficient. So, I want to upgrade my physical memory.

I hesitate to choose whether 8GB memory or 16GB memory? So what is the disadvantage of big memory? CPU is an Intel i5-3230m @ 2.6GHz.

Answer 1

I hesitate to choose whether 8GB memory or 16GB memory? So what is the disadvantage of big memory?

The only real “disadvantage” to a 16GB upgrade versus 8GB upgrade is cost. If cost is not factor, getting as much RAM as your system can handle is always a good thing.

That said, physical installing RAM is one factor in performance improvement. The other is making sure your system can really handle that RAM. Meaning, you can have 16GB installed on your system, but if the application you are using is not properly configured to use the 16GB of RAM you might as well not have an upgrade.

Also, you state you are doing big data analysis: How? If there are file system interactions at play, maybe upgrading the storage to SSD (assuming you don’t already have that installed) could be another way to improve overall system performance.

Answer 2

There is a disk space cost to consider if you are low on storage.

• If you let your laptop hibernate, the hibernation file will grow as it needs to store the state of your RAM, which is volatile. I assume the size of this file is equal to the size of your RAM.
• If you let Windows manage your pagefile, it may increase the size of the file to closer match the size of your physical memory.

In such a case, going from 4 GB of RAM to 16 GB may make it seem like you lost 24 GB of disk space.

But I don't see this as a disadvantage. Just too long for a comment.

Given the choice, always choose more RAM.