Taken from PC World Magazine, October 2010 Edition

Your system is due for a hardware upgrade, but your budget won’t bear the burden of both a blazing new hard drive and an extra injection of RAM.  So it’s decision time: If you’re looking to improve general performance on the cheap, do you shell out for a high-end drive or more memory?

PCWorld Labs analyst Thomas Luoung has an obsession with optimization that borders on clinical, and during a recent day off he found himself idly running performance tests on his home PC just to see what would happen.

The results Thomas brought in to work the next morning were surprising.  When he examined the results, he found virtually no appreciable performance difference between his old Velociraptor setup and the superfast Samsung SSD drive.  What was more startling was the comparatively drastic performance improvement afforded by a RAM upgrade that cost about the same as a new drive.

Thomas has always had the need for speed, and his after-hours optimization tests prove that adding more RAM has the potential to shave the time you spend on workday tasks such as slinging spreadsheets and editing video.  In the eternal battle between performance and price, upgrading your rig with 8GB of DDR3 RAM garners far more bang from your buck than trading up to a boutique high-speed drive like the 128GB Samsung SSD.