Whats your opinion?? (hdd or ram)

[tfward]

So a couple weeks ago I ordered a CTO 2.8 Octo everything standard except I added an 8800gt. So today I picked up an addition 2gb of ram and one of the new 640gb 2 platter WD harddrives. Soon I hope to pick up and additional 4gb of ram and another 640gb WD for Raid 0. After I worked on my budget this evening I realized I have an extra $150 so I can either go ahead and pick up my other hdd or 2 more gigs of ram. So my question is that which one in your opinion should I go ahead and pick up first the hdd or the ram?? Thanks.

P.S.
I'm loving this beast. Its the fastest thing I've ever touched.

 

[ekwipt]

Well the 4 gig of ram is in matched pairs so i'd only get another 4 gb not 2gb to make everything run at full tilt. So my vote would be another HD

 

[pastrychef]

RAM. Adding extra RAM in my Mac Pro made a world of difference in performance. If you are not in dire need of the HD space yet, get the RAM first.

 

[ButtUglyJeff]

It looks like you have a hard drive for time machine, so that would lead me to more ram. Macs love ram..............

 

[Emerson]

I would have to say it depends on what you are doing. If you have editing photos or doing some other ram intensive tasks, then it is a no brainer get the ram. However if you are capturing video or some other disk intensive task get the hard drive. I am personally dealing with the same issue and have decided to just to wait until my tax return comes and then get both 4 x 2gb ram and a couple 640gb WD for storing my photos on. Either way you know you will end up getting both sometime in the future. Good Luck.

Chris

 

[surflordca]

My 2 cents worth. Go for the RAM.

 

[velocityg4]

First off is the Ram you have right now plenty for your needs? You can check activity monitor to add up "Inactive memory" and "free memory" during normal usage to see if it is meeting your needs, if you commonly have say 1-2 GB free you should be fine for now. If it is meeting your needs then definitely go RAID 0. When I got my G5 after upping my RAM to 2.5GB, which was more than enough at the time, I switched out my 160GB HD with two 300GB HD's in RAID 0. The performance leap in saving and transferring video files was amazing. Other performance gains were a quicker boot time, faster application launch speeds and quickly handling large file transfers with other home computers over Gigabit Ethernet.

If you need more memory then follow ekwipts advice and upgrade with four matching memory sticks. Since you are using four matching sticks already you have enabled quad channel memory. If you only add two sticks though you will have more RAM your interface with it will slow down to Dual channel mode.

 

[tfward]

Thanks for all of the responses! I think I'm going to go ahead and order another 640gb WD for Raid 0 and then I'll get me 4 1gb sticks of ram next month when I get my rebate check.

 

[HungrySeacow]

Hey tfward, how are you liking the 640gb WD drive? I want to upgrade the drive in my Mac Pro and I am not quite sure which drive to go for. Is the 640WD as quiet as the stock HD?

So far I have been thinking of either going with one of these drives or two smaller ones for a RAID 0 setup. I want it to be nice and fast though noise is of a concern.

 

[tfward]

So far I love the one I have. I haven't gotten my second one yet (prolly Tuesday). I could a good performance increase over the stock 320 and I can't hear any noticable increase in noise (sounds about the same). It also seems to run cooler then the stock drive. I'd give you some temps, but I'm at work.