Upgrade RAM or SSD ?

[enakeprimen]

Hi,

My 13-inch MBP Early 2011 runs very slow while editing / rendering movies. I think I need to upgrade either the RAM or SSD or both to make it faster.

My question is which one is worthier, upgrade the RAM to 8GB or replace the HDD to SSD? And how much the cost approximately?

Appreciate for your sharing. Tks

About my Mac

 

[enakeprimen]

Found this post http://computechtips.com/macbook-pro-memory-ssd with the same MBP model. Just following it to use Hynix RAM and SSD. It also works well without any issues on my mbp.

 

[blaake]

Hi,

My 13-inch MBP Early 2011 runs very slow while editing / rendering movies. I think I need to upgrade either the RAM or SSD or both to make it faster.

My question is which one is worthier, upgrade the RAM to 8GB or replace the HDD to SSD? And how much the cost approximately?

Appreciate for your sharing. Tks

About my Mac
Image

Im not too sure on which will do you better as i have always upgraded both. Upgrading your ram to 8gb, its only $35. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231294

A quality SSD is going to be a little more costly. a Samsung 830 256gb ssd is anywhere from 160-210 depending on where you find a good price

 

[takeshi74]

My question is which one is worthier, upgrade the RAM to 8GB or replace the HDD to SSD?

Where's your bottleneck?

 

[paul-n]

When you render a movie the CPU is often the bottleneck, not the HDD. Maybe more RAM helps. For editing maybe a SSD can help to get rid of small freezes.
You can try RAM first, then SSD.

 

[DavoteK]

Just so you know, that version MacBook Pro can take up to 16GB of RAM. I have the same version and I'm looking at upgrading it to that amount and also adding a 256GB SSD.

Seen a few videos of speed comparison before and after, sold me on it straight away.

 

[Rhinoevans]

Add 16G Ram. Never can have enough ram, especially since it so cheap these days.

 

[T'hain Esh Kelch]

Take a look in Activity Monitor when you do the rendering. THen you can see if your CPU or RAM is maxed out.

I'm surprised that no one suggested this..

 

[enakeprimen]

I had upgraded the RAM to 8GB and replaced the HDD to SSD one week ago.. It improves my MBP perfectly fast. Anyway, thanks all for your reply.