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4gb RAM or Fast Hard Drive

brosmooth

brosmooth

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 29, 2009
81
0
I have the uMBP, see sig, and ive always planned on getting 4gb of crucial ram, but recently ive been looking at the new...er seagate 7200rpm 500gb HD. I would like some insight from some you pros which i would benefit from most.

On my mac part i mostly do light stuff, surf web, dl and listen to music, play the ocasional mac game, and sims 3 when it oficially comes out soon
on my windows 7 part i installed an x64 version cuz i planned on getting the 4gb remember, and all i do on there is gaming, crysis, biaHH, fallout 3...

so would i benefit in gaming from the 4gb very much? like worth $60 worth? cuz i was thinking if its not, it would be more worth it for faster loading times for mac apps and games... no?
 
I think you'd see the greatest benefit from the RAM.

You will notice an increase in response time from the HDD, but overall, the RAM will be a bigger boost.
 
How much hard drive space do you have right now?

I have a seagate 5400 rpm drive with 500gb. I have 400gb dedicated to OS X and 100gb for Windows XP (waiting for 7 to wipe it). I have both partitions almost full.

If you have a lot of space now then I would say ram. Otherwise if you're nearing the hard top I would get a new HD. If money is tight take a look at the 5400 rpm version of that drive. I've been running it without any problems. Works like a charm and my computer is still faster then all of the other ones in the house!
 
I would go for the RAM.

I tried 2 different 320GB 7200rpm drives (Hitachi and Seagate), and didn't like the extra vibration for marginal performance increase. So I continue to use the 5400rpm disk as I wait for 120GB SSDs to drop in price another ~30%... Give it a few months...

But doubling the RAM should is a cheap way to make the system run smoother, especially when multi tasking.
 
vibrations

RKpro said:
I would go for the RAM.

I tried 2 different 320GB 7200rpm drives (Hitachi and Seagate), and didn't like the extra vibration for marginal performance increase. So I continue to use the 5400rpm disk as I wait for 120GB SSDs to drop in price another ~30%... Give it a few months...

But doubling the RAM should is a cheap way to make the system run smoother, especially when multi tasking.
Click to expand...

Hi

I've upgraded my 5400 to the 7200 and noticed the same thing, its quite alot of vibration.

Do you know if the stock 7200 from Apple does the same, eg all 7200 drives
 
if you do light stuff 2gb of ram is enough for you and if you upgraded to 4gb you won't notice anything. upgrade to the 7200rpm and you'll notice that your files (pictures, musics, applications, movies) will open faster or what some people call 'snappier'.

more ram if you multitask, faster hd if you want things to open up 'snappier'
 
I would also recommend the RAM upgrade. I will be doing the same thing very soon. When I start running out of room on my HDD I will look onto replacing it with a 500GB/7200. Hopefully the prices will drop a little more.
 
Both? For performance gains and multitasking, the RAM will suit you much better. But if you plan on keeping videos, pictures, applications and music in large quantities, the Hard disk it is!
 
RAM FTW, Always try to get the most ram you can afford. Ram offers one of the biggest performance boosts in computing.
 
beerglass007 said:
Hi

I've upgraded my 5400 to the 7200 and noticed the same thing, its quite alot of vibration.

Do you know if the stock 7200 from Apple does the same, eg all 7200 drives
Click to expand...

I'm using the WD 320gb 7200 rpm Scorpio black in my previous gen MBP and I do not notice any extra vibration whatsoever. It does get a tad warmer on that side.

Oh, and for speed, upgrade the RAM first. The less the OS has to page out, the better the performance.
 
BlizzardBomb said:
Except if you look on activity monitor and still have hundreds of MBs free with 2 GBs.
Click to expand...

Yeah, check out Activity Monitor and see how much you really use under typical conditions. chances are, you're probably not utilizing the full 2 GB.

I'm rolling with the same amount of RAM and it's plenty for what I need it to do (similar to your uses, minus the gaming).

I personally vote for a 7200 RPM drive, since boot times are a lot more noticeable to me than system slowdown from inadequate RAM.
 
Guess I'm to used to working with windows systems, still kinda new to the mac thing my work place only installed there first system 2 weeks ago. Still used to booting up Vista and seeing it already use 1gb of ram lol.

I had to do some reading earlier and have come to realize OS X is constantly changing the amount of ram software uses.

I have to say as a trained window professional i do like the Mac OS, it seems to run stable and everything flows nicely.
 
MagpieX said:
Guess I'm to used to working with windows systems, still kinda new to the mac thing my work place only installed there first system 2 weeks ago. Still used to booting up Vista and seeing it already use 1gb of ram lol.

I had to do some reading earlier and have come to realize OS X is constantly changing the amount of ram software uses.

I have to say as a trained window professional i do like the Mac OS, it seems to run stable and everything flows nicely.
Click to expand...

The cliche' is true: "Once you go Mac, you never go back.";)
 
I say go with the RAM upgrade. I know that 5400 is quite slow, but you only notice it when doing long installs or large data trasfers. For day to day stuff you will hardly notice the difference. I had raptor drives on my desktop PC and they were pretty zippy. But again I only noticed the increase in speed during installs or data transfers.
 
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