Unibody Macbook Performance Upgrade

[Jman6439]

Hello all

After a year and a half owning one of the first Unibody MacBooks, i feel its time for a little polishing!

I have been considering a new HDD (probably a WD Scorpio Blue 500GB) along with a 4GB upgrade from 2GB provided by Crucial. However, I've been reading articles on SSDs and how the performance is unmatched. Considering the lowering prices, and the approxiamte equal price value of HDD/Ram and SSD, which path should I take that would increase the performace significantly?

I know the main question would be, well what do you use you're MacBook for. Primarly listening to music, surfing the internet, using iPhoto (for viewing and editing, iMovie (for the obvious movie editing I do a couple times a year), GarageBand (a unsigned musician that just loves recording and playing around), and the obvious student tools (office and iwork).

Could anyone please help me out?

Thanks

Cheers,
Jon

 

[Jman6439]

More simplistic

To shorten the above, which would give generally a bigger performance upgrade, a new HDD/ram or just a SSD with standard 2gb on the MacBook.

 

[GfulDedFan]

To shorten the above, which would give generally a bigger performance upgrade, a new HDD/ram or just a SSD with standard 2gb on the MacBook.

I'd go for the idea of increasing RAM but it depends on where you would feel the most boost. If you want your MacBook to start faster, launch programs faster, open files faster, etc then a faster HD (7200rpm) or an SSD would be the way to go. If, on the the other hand, you want to be able to have a faster and more stable situation with multiple apps running at the same time, then a RAM increase would be better.

I found a happy medium by increasing my RAM to 4GB and changing the 5400rpm stock drive with a 7200rpm drive. To me, the SSDs are still a little pricey for the size.

 

[Jman6439]

Hard drive

Yeah I agree the SDDs are pretty pricy for thr little space you get.

I've heard however I don't know if this is true, but that thr WD Scorpio blue 500gb is about as fast or even faster than a typical 7200. Is this true though?

 

[marsmissions]

An upgrade in speed on a hard drive will cause the battery life to suffer, keep that in mind. Also, SSDs are too expensive right now if you do not have a healthy income. I just did a ram upgrade on mine, and everything is working good. I don't see how you could even need 4gb of ram with the activities above, but you could upgrade to 4 gb is you wanted it would improve multitasking.

 

[altecXP]

An upgrade in speed on a hard drive will cause the battery life to suffer, keep that in mind. Also, SSDs are too expensive right now if you do not have a healthy income. I just did a ram upgrade on mine, and everything is working good. I don't see how you could even need 4gb of ram with the activities above, but you could upgrade to 4 gb is you wanted it would improve multitasking.

Not By Much. I can get 4.5hrs from my Unibody 13in when just using wireless with bluetooth off and brightness at 1/2 while web browsing.

I have a 320GB 7200 WD black and 4GB of Mushkin brand Memory. A 500GB 5400rpm will be about as fast as a 320GB 7200rpm due to disk density.