Trying to understand RAM and SSD

[macswitcha2]

I have unibody Macbook late 2008 (model MacBook5,1). It currently has 4GB of RAM ( see below). It also has a 250.06 GB FUJITSU MHZ2250BH FFS G1 hard drive. As you can see below, the RAM speed is 1067 MHz. I believe I can upgrade to 6 GB of Ram but I hear that the RAM will only be as fast as the speed even if you update to a faster RAM.

So what's the benefit of upgrading the RAM?

Also, how do I know if the following SSD work with my mac? I'm looking at http://www.amazon.com/Crucial-2-5-I...=1344140703&sr=8-1&keywords=solid+state+drive





Size: 2 GB
Type: DDR3
Speed: 1067 MHz
Status: OK
Manufacturer: 0x80AD
Part Number: 0x484D54313235533641465238432D47372020
Serial Number: 0x20060000

BANK 0/DIMM1:

Size: 2 GB
Type: DDR3
Speed: 1067 MHz
Status: OK
Manufacturer: 0x80AD
Part Number: 0x484D54313235533641465238432D47372020
Serial Number: 0x200C0000

 

[takezo808]

Speed is seccondary to capacity

for RAM capacity is always better than clock speed.

Computers have stoped writing directly to memory a long while ago. The OS generates a virtual memory address space where instructions or data for a process of the OS and applications that are running.

This address space can exist in physical memory or on the HDD in a page file offten called the swap file. Basically whatever can't fit into physical memory is stored in the swap file. Since HDDs and even SSDs are far slower than RAM increasing physical memory would drastically increase speed of computer since more instructions and data existed in the much fater RAM and can thus be accessed quicker.

32-bit vs 64-bit. The bits are reserved for the address pool. Old 32-bit computers had a memory space maximum of 4GB. Basically 4GB was the maximum memory space a 32-bit OS would be able to access. 64-bit OS can access far more. So if you had 4GB on your Intel Macs which are 64-bit, and your memory usage is 6GB, 2GB of data will be on the SSD on the swap file thus causing a bottleneck, faster clock speed memory will not solve, only adding more memory will.