MacBook Pro Hard Drive or Mac Pro Ram - Which will I see a greater performance boost?

[reese.reimers]

I am wanting to upgrade either my 17" Unibody MBP or my early 2008 2.8 Octo Mac Pro. I mainly am doing audio production with some video production. My MacBook pro has the stock 320 gb 5400 rpm drive in it and I can see some slight performance loss when using many applications/plugins in Pro Tools. My Mac Pro has the stock 2gb of ram that came in it and I see the same performance loss.

So, what do you think I would see the most gain with. Should I go with a 7200 rpm drive (I am thinking about the 500 gig Seagate but I have seen a lot of issues with the drive) or added ram for the Mac Pro? I don't think I could swing adding two 4 gig modules of ram so I would just go with adding 2x2gb sticks from OWC.

Thanks!

 

[mrj412]

Check how much ram you have free - Utilities -> Activity Monitor. Under System Memory check if you are using swap space.

If you are using more than 2Gb of ram, I would say upgrading the memory will give you the most performance boost. The hard drive might help apps and files load faster, but adding memory will keep the system from swapping to the hard drive and give a noticeable boost.

 

[surflordca]

Check how much ram you have free - Utilities -> Activity Monitor. Under System Memory check if you are using swap space.

If you are using more than 2Gb of ram, I would say upgrading the memory will give you the most performance boost. The hard drive might help apps and files load faster, but adding memory will keep the system from swapping to the hard drive and give a noticeable boost.

I couldn't of said it better myself...