Hi all,
So my original iMac 17" (Core Duo 1.8GHz) is starting to show its age, not necessarily the graphics and processor so much as the 2GB ram ceiling. I find myself swapping like crazy with any moderate workload.
Eventually I will be upgrading to a Mini (once the specs make it worth upgrading) or an iMac (once the QA on the LCDs begins to settle down). However, I need a modest performance boost to hold me over for the next several months. Since RAM is already maxed out, I was thinking about getting a small OCZ ssd, replace it as a boot drive, and move my user folder off to one of my external drives.
The question I'm hoping folks could answer is: Given that I'm already swapping pretty heavily on a regular basis, would the SSD make the swapping happen fast enough to produce a noticeable performance increase? I realize that I'd be limited to 150MB/sec due to the SATA I bus, but even that should be quite a bit faster than the old 160GB hard drive, correct? If anyone has experience with how an SSD affects the performance of a RAM-constrained Mac, I'm all ears.
So my original iMac 17" (Core Duo 1.8GHz) is starting to show its age, not necessarily the graphics and processor so much as the 2GB ram ceiling. I find myself swapping like crazy with any moderate workload.
Eventually I will be upgrading to a Mini (once the specs make it worth upgrading) or an iMac (once the QA on the LCDs begins to settle down). However, I need a modest performance boost to hold me over for the next several months. Since RAM is already maxed out, I was thinking about getting a small OCZ ssd, replace it as a boot drive, and move my user folder off to one of my external drives.
The question I'm hoping folks could answer is: Given that I'm already swapping pretty heavily on a regular basis, would the SSD make the swapping happen fast enough to produce a noticeable performance increase? I realize that I'd be limited to 150MB/sec due to the SATA I bus, but even that should be quite a bit faster than the old 160GB hard drive, correct? If anyone has experience with how an SSD affects the performance of a RAM-constrained Mac, I'm all ears.