HI, I just replaced my HDD with a Samsung 850 EVO SSD without any issues (apart from Office now wanting a new product key) and found the drive lightening fast however my available RAM has dropped by average 2-3Gb!!!! Previously on my old HDD I had typically 5.8Gb-6Gb of my 8Gb after bootup - now its 2-3Gb - what going on why this drop? HELP
I am using a Macbook Pro Mid 2012 running Maveriks (10.9.5).
MacBook Pro, OS X Mavericks (10.9.5)
I do not believe it has anything to do with the SSD. Did you clone your old drive to your new SSD? Perhaps you have programs running at startup that you did not have before. You can run the EtreCheck program and post the results here for some additional assistance.
I do not believe it has anything to do with the SSD. Did you clone your old drive to your new SSD? Perhaps you have programs running at startup that you did not have before. You can run the EtreCheck program and post the results here for some additional assistance.
Free RAM is RAM that you've paid for, and that's being wasted. Occupied RAM is working, whether it's supporting the operating system, or running programs, or simply acting as a cache to speed up I/O. As fast as an SSD might appear, RAM is massively faster.
As for free RAM, you will want enough around to allow applications to launch quickly. This without requiring OS X to have to find some other application(s) to evict or to compress. But beyond that...
If you want to see what the RAM is doing, launch Activity Monitor.app and have a look around. See the Memory tab.
If "Just Replaced" is within the last few hours (maybe day or 2), then Spotlight is going to be re-indexing the SSD. This will generate a lot of I/O and lots of file caching will occur.
If it has been awhile, such that Spotlight is finished, then it will not be Spotlight.
Wild theory. Maybe OS X sees that it is an SSD and is being more aggressive at avoiding writes to extend the life of the SSD which has a finite number of writes before it wears out. Again, this is a "Wild Guess".
Thanks everyone, I believe that yes Spotlight was having a minimal impact initially - I also found although i'd built the SSD from a time machine backup after i'd installed OSX there were some settings missing in Chrome (when will they ever fix the memory hogs there) but still getting a big difference in memory availability - i'll keep clearing memory in meantime but if any other suggestions more than welcome please.
The comment MrHoffman made is true but mostly with Yosemite. Mavericks does not use the same system to manage RAM so you should be using about what you did before installing the SSD. I did the exact same thing and my memory did not change. Not sure what is happening in your case.
samsung 850 evo ssd impacts memory
