Does a lot of RAM cancel the need of an SSD drive?

[PompiPompi]

I have always used HDD in my PCs and Macs and almost never had SSD.
SSD is suppose to help booting the OS faster and making reads and writes to files faster.
However, isn't a lot of RAM is going to give the same or even better performance in reading and writing files?
Well, depends...
You know how you see on Windows that a lot of apps take a lot of RAM?
That is because windows tries to cache all the files it thinks will be required for reading and writing.
It cache it for reads, prefetching the file into the RAM, but it can also keep a copy of the file in the RAM and have faster writes until it needs to be dumped.

I am not sure OSX does the same though...

So at least for windows, and maybe OSX, wouldn't it be better to just have 32 or even 64 GB of RAM + HDD instead of less RAM and an SSD?
Or is there a balance?

One of the issues with an SSD is that it doesn't have as much capacity as an HDD and if you put the OS on it you tend to fill it up quick and then it's a lot harder to migrate your OS to another drive.

What do you think? What is the ideal combination of RAM/HDD/SSD?
For Windows? For OSX?

Well lets say our use case is development, and games...

 

[kch50428]

Does a lot of RAM cancel the need of an SSD drive?

No... HD/SSD is long term storage where RAM is short term...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/3742226?start=0&tstart=0

CPU vs. RAM vs. SSD: Which Mac upgrades should you get? | iMore

 

[PompiPompi]

I know that.
Both Long term storage and short term storage are required.
However, which combination will give the best performance?
My question is wouldn't a PC or a Mac perform better with an HDD of 1TB+64GB of RAM instead of configuration of 0.5TB SSD + 8GB RAM?
SSD and HDD are both long term storage only SSD has faster access. However, with caching a lot of RAM can optimize and speed up the access to the HDD.

 

[kch50428]

However, which combination will give the best performance?

It's a personal preference thing. Whatever meets your needs.

 

[iEd]

I believe max ram in a Mac will give you great performance but as far as the hard drive it depends on the task.
Constant read and writing task like video or music production a SSD will give you probably optimum performance with max ram.
Video production is probably the most disk and ram intense task one can do in my opinion.
I don't think there is a hard number or combination anyone can give you other than max everything. Max ram and the largest SSD or the best your budget allows.