Couple questions about my MacBook Pro

[JGallant29]

Hey guys, I've noticed a recent significant drop in performance on my MacBook. I started to look into it a bit and I am starting to realize that my read and write speeds (via blackmagic speed test), seem to be extremely slow for my specs (often always just above 60 MB/s for both read and write). Just wondering if any of you might know why this would be or if you have any suggestions on where to go from here.

On another note, after inspecting Activity Monitor i can see that my MacBook is almost always using the entire 8 GB of available ram even when I'm not running any programs. Is this something that is the norm and should be expected? Or could this be the root of the performance drop.

Here are the specs of my machine and I've included a few pictures as well to maybe help.

I have a Mid 2012, 13" MacBook pro, i've got the upgraded processor to the 2.9GHz i7, and I have 8 GB of ram, also the original 750 Gb SATA hard drive the laptop came with.

 

[yjchua95]

Hey guys, I've noticed a recent significant drop in performance on my MacBook. I started to look into it a bit and I am starting to realize that my read and write speeds (via blackmagic speed test), seem to be extremely slow for my specs (often always just above 60 MB/s for both read and write). Just wondering if any of you might know why this would be or if you have any suggestions on where to go from here.

On another note, after inspecting Activity Monitor i can see that my MacBook is almost always using the entire 8 GB of available ram even when I'm not running any programs. Is this something that is the norm and should be expected? Or could this be the root of the performance drop.

Here are the specs of my machine and I've included a few pictures as well to maybe help.

I have a Mid 2012, 13" MacBook pro, i've got the upgraded processor to the 2.9GHz i7, and I have 8 GB of ram, also the original 750 Gb SATA hard drive the laptop came with.

Those speeds are normal for a HDD.

If you want to get around 400MB/s or so, you need an SSD.

 

[scaredpoet]

As for the RAM usage: Yes, it's normal. Starting with OS X Mavericks, the operating system makes as much use of the RAM as it can, for caching and preloading of data. This is intended to speed up performance: if data or apps you're likely to use are already preloaded in RAM, your Mac won't have to wait to load them from disk. Of course if you need the RAM for a specific app or large project, OS X will give up that cache space as needed.

Basically, the idea is that unused RAM is wasted RAM. Better that you get your money's worth for the RAM you paid for.

 

[Meister]

Exchange your hdd for an ssd.

The blackmagic test results are irrelevant for real world performance.
The relevant speed difference (iops) between hdd and ssd is by a thousand times!

Yosemite will always occupy whatever ram you have available.
It also doesn't work well with hdds.

 

[JGallant29]

Thanks a lot for the help fellas, I am looking into getting a 500 GB SSD and maybe a little ram upgrade while im at it.