Laptop with both RAM and flash memory

[Renee-Claude Ouellet]

Hi, I recently bought a laptop for gaming and work (photoshop) so the RAM was important.
The seller suggested a very nice laptop displayed with 8 gb of RAM + 8gb flash memory. I was a little douptful but the seller convinced me that it was better than a laptop with 12gb. So I bought the laptop, installed it and curious about the RAM, looked at the performance and..8gb only. Is it here only for preserving the battery life? And if it was here would it show at some point in the specs?

 

[beers]

Hello,

the seller convinced me that it was better than a laptop with 12gb.

They lied to you then, 8 GB of RAM is not 12, and flash is orders of magnitude slower than RAM.

What hard disk is in there, what model of PC is it? If it is a SSHD drive then they deliberately mislead you as those contain a 8 GB flash buffer, but are generally awful performers.

 

[Renee-Claude Ouellet]

Thank you, it's a dell inspiron, hard drive 1tb (is that what you meant by hard disk?), processor intel i7-6700HQ.
Here is the link if you need more info:
http://m.bestbuy.ca/defaultpage.asp...etails.aspx?ajax=true&sku=10397055&lang=en-CA

(I just looked and the flash memory is listed with the hard drive memory...)

 

[beers]

That's a pretty good laptop, with an SSD it would be great.

Yeah, the flash with the hard drive just means it is a cross between a normal hard drive and it has a 8 GB SSD cache integrated within it (known as SSHD). It really has nothing to do with RAM and they shouldn't be compared together.

The flash on the disk will put frequently accessed data onto the cache, which is a little bit faster of storage, but you can't use it in the same way you use RAM.

 

[Renee-Claude Ouellet]

Glad I learned that! This is why I hate talking to sellers... Thank you!

 

[FuryRosewood]

Buy yourself a samsung 850 m.2 drive, clone the harddrive, and install another 8 gigs of ram. it will scream.