RAM or Hard Drive?

[jbyun04]

I'm thinking about upgrading one of the two.. either upgrade to 6GB ram or get the Momentus XT hard drive. My brother says I'll notice more of a boost by upgrading the hard drive so I was kind of leaning towards that.

Also, will there be any problems if I buy one 4GB OWC chip to use with a stock 2GB Apple chip that comes with my MBP?

Mid 2009 MacBook Pro
2.8GHZ Intel Core 2 Duo
4GB Ram (2x2)

 

[Hellhammer]

Do you need RAM? It doesn't speed up unless you use it (use RAM intensive apps or multitasking). Check Activity Monitor for RAM usage. HD is the biggest bottleneck so I would upgrade it

 

[zmttoxics]

The RAM is only going to help if you need it. Open the activity monitor and check to see if you are doing lots of swapping.

If you already have a 7200RPM drive, moving to the XT isn't going to help all that much either.

 

[jbyun04]

sorry i forgot to mention my uses:

CS4 - Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Dreamweaver. Usually two are open at the same time
if not cs4 then,
Final Cut Studio

And iTunes + Adium + Mail + Chrome + Firefox will always be running in the backgound as well

 

[Hellhammer]

sorry i forgot to mention my uses:

CS4 - Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Dreamweaver. Usually two are open at the same time
if not cs4 then,
Final Cut Studio

And iTunes + Adium + Mail + Chrome + Firefox will always be running in the backgound as well

Then RAM update would be better as those apps are RAM intensive. Faster HD/SSD only speeds up app launching but not actually the tasks you are doing

 

[OWCMichael]

The OWC memory you're looking for is:
http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/8566D6R3S4GB/

It is qualified and tested to work in 6GB configurations.

The other responders are absolutely correct. If choosing between additional RAM or a faster hard drive, check Activity Monitor to see if you're paging out your memory. If you do, then more memory will definitely help.

If not, then a faster hard drive would be the way to go.

For the ultimate in speed, you could go with a Solid State Drive:
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/internal_storage/Mercury_Extreme_SSD_Sandforce

 

[jbyun04]

^^awesome

thanks for the help guys