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SSD or RAM

D

dwd3885

macrumors 68020
Original poster
Dec 10, 2004
2,137
197
I have the 15" MBP Unibody computer in my sig. I have the 2gb of RAM in it. Opening up programs seems to take forever and it just seems sluggish. I know a ram upgrade would help and it's cheaper than a SSD, but what about these options:

4GB Ram vs 128 GB SSD.

I mean, I could go for both, but probably won't. Which will increase my performance more?
 
Hi Mate,

We have had this discussion in a Hasselblad forum and the outcome was that RAM is the first investment you should make. The people who invested in SSD did express disappointment over the performance improvements although they certainly did. I have the new MacPro 2,93 with 32 GB RAM and have left all considerations of changing the main drive to SSD to achieve higher performance.

One of the points that were raised as advantageous for the SSD were the durability and its ability to be bashed around better while people were shooting on location (out of studio).

Hope that helped a bit.

Magnus :apple:

dwd3885 said:
I have the 15" MBP Unibody computer in my sig. I have the 2gb of RAM in it. Opening up programs seems to take forever and it just seems sluggish. I know a ram upgrade would help and it's cheaper than a SSD, but what about these options:

4GB Ram vs 128 GB SSD.

I mean, I could go for both, but probably won't. Which will increase my performance more?
Click to expand...
 
More RAM won't make things load faster unless you are actually maxing out what you have right now. Go to Activity Monitor in the Utilities folder of the Applications folder and see how much RAM you are actually using.
 
You MBP has better specs than my white Macbook, except for the memory. My Macbook is plenty fast, and I'm running a 5400 RPM hard drive - I actually just downgraded from a 7200 RPM due to vibration and lost battery life. I say go memory first - and clean up your system a bit (repair permissions, run Cocktail, etc.). Other than that, barring a technical problem, your machine should be faster than both of mine. :)
 
js81 said:
You MBP has better specs than my white Macbook, except for the memory. My Macbook is plenty fast, and I'm running a 5400 RPM hard drive - I actually just downgraded from a 7200 RPM due to vibration and lost battery life. I say go memory first - and clean up your system a bit (repair permissions, run Cocktail, etc.). Other than that, barring a technical problem, your machine should be faster than both of mine. :)
Click to expand...

you think? what's cocktail?

i'll do permissions repair
 
SSD I just got a new air with an SSd drive and it is leaving my other machines trailing. So much so that I am looking at upgrading my other drives all to SSD. I was a bit worried the air would be slow, but this has not been the case.
 
if your usage pattern is running a lot of programs at the same time, i believe ram is more useful, after you open apps and exit it, whenever you open it for the second time, it will be fast, because it's cached on the ram, but if u don't run and use a lot of apps at the same time, then i believe SSD would be a greater benefit.

i owned a UMBP17" with 4GB of ram already, but opening apps is slower than my macbook air 128GBSSD, since i already get used to this Air's SSD, then i bought a corsair SSD just to make my UMBP17" even faster.. it's fast, beyond expectation, because of 4GB RAM and 2.66ghz processor that my macbook air doesn't have.
 
aleni said:
if your usage pattern is running a lot of programs at the same time, i believe ram is more useful, after you open apps and exit it, whenever you open it for the second time, it will be fast, because it's cached on the ram, but if u don't run and use a lot of apps at the same time, then i believe SSD would be a greater benefit.

i owned a UMBP17" with 4GB of ram already, but opening apps is slower than my macbook air 128GBSSD, since i already get used to this Air's SSD, then i bought a corsair SSD just to make my UMBP17" even faster.. it's fast, beyond expectation, because of 4GB RAM and 2.66ghz processor that my macbook air doesn't have.
Click to expand...

Here are my stats from activity monitor:

Free: 85.95 MB
Wired: 253.99 MB
Active: 995.19 MB
Inactive: 452.41 MB
Used: 1.66 GB
VM Size: 54.63 GB
Page ins: 1.02 GB
Page outs: 674.59 MB
Swap used: 813.17 MB

I restarted my computer last two days ago.

I have Gmail app, Safari, iTunes, iPhoto, textedit and tweetie open.

Is that a lot of apps to have open? Doesn't seem like a lot.
 
it's not much of apps. Better get ssd.

But i like the idea of getting ram first then ssd later. Ssd price is getting lower in the future.
 
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