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Did I Just waste 235 Dollars?

sukanas

sukanas

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Nov 15, 2007
684
1
well, i got the stock 2.4 unibody and upgraded it to 4gb of ram and a 320gb hd

to be honest, im not really seeing the difference in boot up times, aperture, program loadup times (MS08 still freaggin slow), and etc..

i dont really see myself as a guy trying to juice out every power on his mac but i thought there would be a night and day difference.. am i expecting too much?

usually from my previous mac, going fro 1gb to 3gb just made a HUGE difference. upgrading the HD was just dumb on my part... lol

and the xbench doesnt yield too much of an improvement either..

well, i learned a lesson from this..
dont upgrade if you dont NEED too... lol


edit:
left one is the stock 5400 rpm drive w/ 2 gb of ram
 

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What is the cache on the new drive?

I don't know that there is a big difference in the 250 5400 to 320gb 7200 because of platter size on the 250 approximates the 7200 speed.

If you got the cheap 2.0 Mac Book like I did, with the 160gb 5400 you would probably see more of a difference when upgrading to the 320gb 7200 hd.

When I put in a 5400 250gb ide ata drive in my Powerbook, it was almost the same speed as the fastest ide hd made, the 100gb Travelstar 7200. Let's say identical, because of the bigger platters in the 250 drive.
 
I'm a photographer and find that it's always best to upgrade the RAM in you work machine. The hard drive has never an issue for me and I'd suggest putting the old drive in an enclosure and use it for Time Machine or for backing up your images and business paperwork. I went with the base MBP and will upgrade the RAM shortly and already use three external drives (GTechnology) for the reasons I've listed above.
 
You should not regret about the additional ram you added, first they are cheaper to buy directly from Apple right now (10$ less then the least expensive one available) and if any go wrong and you send your MB to repair, they won't accuse your 3rd party ram if you upgrade it yourself.

Even if you wanted to buy the baseline 2GB from Apple, upgrade later and sell them, believe me they won't sell well, nobody would want to buy it since that's pretty much the standard on every laptop/desktop right now.

And, by the way, if you do any intensive task with aperture in the near future, 4GB will be useful.

You made the right choice. When i brought my MB I also wanted to upgrade from Apple, but couldn't since it was out of my budget for now.
 
I run a program called iFreeMem to keep an eye on my RAM usage, since I'm limited to 2GB.

On my daily tasks(running Firefox, Adium, and iTunes), it rarely goes over half of the RAM being used. Even when I'm running Photoshop, it ends up sitting just below being fully used. Running a virtual machine is another story.

I'm just saying, if not even 2GB is being used, that extra 2GB is not being used for anything, and therefore, you won't notice a difference, because it's no utilitizing all of the ram.

But as mentioned above, when you do run a memory intensive task, such as Aperature, or even multiple programs in an Adobe Creative Suite, or a virtual machine, you'll certainly not regret having that extra memory.

If you don't need the extra hard drive space, I'd do as mentioned above and replace it with your stock one, and I'd throw the 320GB in an external enclosure and use it for Time Machine/storage.
 
One of the reasons why I upgraded from 2GB to 4GB was because I noticed that when I did multitasking with a lot of browser windows, a lot of office windows and things like that, my page-outs to page-ins ratio was really bad (like 50:100, when it should be 15:100 at most), so I was getting slowdowns because the system kept needing to write out to the hard drive.

4GB RAM for me made things slightly faster, but the key improvement is that I can run many many things at once without slowdowns and with a page-out to page-in ratio under 10:100 most of the time.
 
guys wheres the cheapest and best place to buy 3rd party ram? Allthough i hear you can put 6gigs into the MacBook Pro. I can only assume 4 is fine for me!
 
I think you were expecting too much. With 1GB and OS X you could be swapping so adding memory makes a much bigger difference. That's not the case with 2GB so adding memory doesn't speed it up unless you are running a hungry app. 4GB with Aperture will make a difference once you load up a bunch of photos. The HD will probably make a 5 - 10 second difference in boot up. I will help in program making a lot of disk access (like Aperture) but it won't be night and day.
 
With drives we tend to say look at the cache size, the warranty, and the actual GB size of the drive, since the drives tend to operate at about the same transfer speed range.

Unless you specifically hunt down drives with the fastest mechanical transfer limit. And even that can bite you in the ass if the programmed cache routine is at odds with your typical use.

Don't worry, the drive you bought is likely .5-1 second faster than the old one in general. :p
 
Your Mac will take longer to boot with 4GB RAM.

You shouldn't shut your Mac down though - they sleep beautifully :)
 
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