While replacing the system battery in my HP Slimline 290, I added a 4 GB stick of Crucial DDR4 2400 MHz RAM and a 500 GB Samsung 980 NVMe SSD. The whole thing, including a CR2032 battery, an M.2 screw kit, and a Torx driver cost a little over $100 from Amazon (and Home Depot).

With 8 GB of RAM installed, memory usage while running all of my basic programs (Chrome, Word, Notepad++ and JWPce) fell in half to around 40 percent. More importantly, thanks to the dual-channel architecture, filling both banks of DDR4 RAM doubled memory throughput.

4 GB DDR4 RAM (2400 MHz CL17)
Novabench         13015 MB/s
WinSat            13313 MB/s

8 GB DDR4 RAM (2400 MHz CL17)
Novabench         24106 MB/s
WinSat            26737 MB/s

I cloned the HDD drive using the Samsung Data Migration tool. After taking the recommended precautions—running chkdsk, deleting temporary files, and shutting down extraneous programs—it completed without a hitch. All I had to do was select the new boot drive in BIOS and I was ready to go.

Doubling the RAM noticeably improved the overall performance of the system. But switching to an SSD is like upgrading from floppy disks to a HDD back in the day. Over ten times faster right off the bat.

500 GB Toshiba DT01ACA HDD (SATA 7200)
                Write          Read
Novabench     128 MB/s       133 MB/s
WinSat                       115 MB/s

500 GB Samsung 980 SSD (PCIe 3.0 NVMe)
                Write          Read
Novabench    1467 MB/s      1047 MB/s 
WinSat                      1499 MB/s 

The benchmarking provided by the Samsung Magician app is no less dramatic. (IOPS is short for Input/Output Operations Per Second.)

500 GB Toshiba DT01ACA HDD (SATA 7200)
                Write          Read
Sequential    158 MB/s       158 MB/s
Random        216 IOPS       179 IOPS

500 GB Samsung 980 SSD (PCIe 3.0 NVMe)
                Write          Read
Sequential   1564 MB/s      1651 MB/s
Random     100341 IOPS    147705 IOPS

From a cold boot to launching Chrome, the current configuration cuts the startup time by 80 percent. Shutting down now takes a few seconds. The time to complete a routine Windows Update decreased an order of magnitude. And that's with a lowly Celeron CPU.

Related posts

From XP to X
Speeding up the Slimline
The state of the solid state

Labels: computers, slimline, technology