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Macbook pro upgrade
- Thread starter Polo2883
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Are you doing something that will actually use 16GB of RAM?
When you say "adding" the SSD - it's going in the optical bay spot?
Depends on what you are doing and what you put on the SSD, but the drive is probably the easy winner.
When you say "adding" the SSD - it's going in the optical bay spot?
Depends on what you are doing and what you put on the SSD, but the drive is probably the easy winner.
Go for the 8gb and SSD unless you're running apps that will use the 16gb.
If you're not using 16gb of ram, the spare ram will only be used for disk cache.
And rather than trying to cache some crappy 5400 or 7200 rpm mechanical disk with a spare say, 8gb of RAM used for cache, you'll get far better speed out of having ALL of your storage (not just the cached bits) much faster.
To put it in perspective - random IO performance (which is more representative of multitasking than some sequential read/write number) on a 7200 rpm disk is around 70-80 IOs per second.
Some of the faster SSDs can do upwards of 40,000 IOs per second.
SSD really is a game-changer, having more RAM than you need - not so much. If you run short of RAM and need to go to swap, the SSD will be much faster than the hard drive. I'd even hazard a guess that working on say, a 20gb file would be faster on a machine with 8gb+SSD than on a machine with 16gb+HDD (but have no benchmark to back that up).
Real world example: the 11" 2010 air in my sig kills the 2011 15" Macbook Pro in my sig for most tasks that are not CPU or video bound. It starts far faster, loads apps faster, etc. With half the RAM and a CPU that isn't even close.
If you're not using 16gb of ram, the spare ram will only be used for disk cache.
And rather than trying to cache some crappy 5400 or 7200 rpm mechanical disk with a spare say, 8gb of RAM used for cache, you'll get far better speed out of having ALL of your storage (not just the cached bits) much faster.
To put it in perspective - random IO performance (which is more representative of multitasking than some sequential read/write number) on a 7200 rpm disk is around 70-80 IOs per second.
Some of the faster SSDs can do upwards of 40,000 IOs per second.
SSD really is a game-changer, having more RAM than you need - not so much. If you run short of RAM and need to go to swap, the SSD will be much faster than the hard drive. I'd even hazard a guess that working on say, a 20gb file would be faster on a machine with 8gb+SSD than on a machine with 16gb+HDD (but have no benchmark to back that up).
Real world example: the 11" 2010 air in my sig kills the 2011 15" Macbook Pro in my sig for most tasks that are not CPU or video bound. It starts far faster, loads apps faster, etc. With half the RAM and a CPU that isn't even close.
It really depends on your usage. If you're using multiple pro apps, then the 16gb may make sense. If you're just surfing the web, doing office apps, well then the SSD makes sense.
Personally I'd use the MBP, monitor the swap outs, and then maybe upgrade the ram to 8GB and then repeat your monitoring. Upgrading a component without really knowing if you need too could be a waste of money.
the SSD will improve performance for all disk I/O operations so that's a safe bet to upgrade.
Personally I'd use the MBP, monitor the swap outs, and then maybe upgrade the ram to 8GB and then repeat your monitoring. Upgrading a component without really knowing if you need too could be a waste of money.
the SSD will improve performance for all disk I/O operations so that's a safe bet to upgrade.