Does my HDD use more RAM than my SSD?

• RAM is Fleeting once the power is lost the data held in it is gone!
• Storage (SSD or HDD) is long term. Once the data is written to it, it can be recovered.

Now this gets a bit tricky!

As your system is limited in its memory (8 GB) you can run into a condition the OS and/or the apps need more RAM to complete what you are asking your system to do. So your system cheats! Basically, it steals area on your drive as Virtual RAM extending the memory space. This Virtual RAM is only used when RAM is tight. Virtual Memory - 1 Introduction If you are using Windows Memory Paging is used Paging Technique : Memory management in Operating System.

In addition your system uses caching to speed up repetitive actions, this too is kept on the drive What are Disk Cache & Buffers? Byte Size and lastly your applications can use your boot drive as a scratch space for large works. This often can be altered if needed.

OK, that’s a lot of stuff!

So to get to your question: Does your HDD take up more RAM and the SSD take less?

If I have two drives that are the same size one HDD and the other an SSD the amount of RAM used for its index will be the same as well as the pointer tables. The amount of RAM is very slight and again the system will leverage Virtual RAM if need be to extend the RAM work space. If you had two larger drives of the same size again there is no difference. But, as you have two different sized drives then there is a slight difference 10-50 KB or so.

The bigger issue is the speed and durability of the SSD over the HDD. But the negative side of SSD’s, is there cost is higher than HDD’s. Power is another space SSD’s are better, more so with the newest generations.