4 Things to Know About Upgrading RAM With a SATA SSD

More RAM reduces swap writes Upgrading to 16GB means Windows uses your SSD as overflow memory less often, cutting down on read and write operations during heavy multitasking.

Your SATA SSD is still the bottleneck Even with more RAM, the SATA SSD tops out around 500 MB/s in best cases and has much higher latency than RAM, so don’t expect it to feel fast.

Swapping is inherently slow When you run out of RAM, Windows swaps data to the SSD, which is far slower than RAM. More RAM reduces this, but the SSD’s speed limit remains.

The upgrade helps only if you hit the 8GB ceiling If you frequently max out 8GB—like with dozens of browser tabs, Slack, and a video call—more RAM reduces swapping, but the SSD won’t suddenly perform better.