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Upgrading MacPro...Memory

S

ShakyJay

macrumors member
Original poster
Oct 17, 2010
44
0
I have a MacBook Pro (mid 2010) I bought the 256gb hard drive model, as it was the one that was in my budget at the time. I absolutely love it, however after playing on my cousins brand new MacPro I am considering upgrading my memory.

I was thinking about a 500-1tb Sata hard drive and upgrading the memory to 8gb.

Do you think that this will make the Mac quicker (snappier), and will it help with the encoding of movies? I do a lot of movie making/copying.

Do you have any recommendations for hard drives?

I have read a lot of reviews and have done a ton of research on different drives. I am not sure if the 7200RPM will cause a lot more vibration and noise or should I just stick with the 5600? I use the Mac on a daily basis, so noise and heat need to be at a minimum.

Just basically need someone to give me some recommendations as I am in a sea of drives and need some direction.

Thanks fellow Mac'ers
 
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Youre better off getting a small SSD drive only for your OS and applications and using a secondary hard drive to store your data (music, movies, documents, porn, etc).

RAM isnt going to make any snappier unless you max out your RAM by running many applications at once or heavy documents (100mb+ PSD files, for example and lots of memory allocated to photoshop)

Btw, wrong forum.

----------

Also, get the 7,200rpm drive. Slower drive won't do you much good, the 7,200rpm drives are significantly faster. Try going for a Western Digital Black. The WD Green drives are OK, I have one and its read/write speeds are around 90mb/s.

Vibration from them isnt an issue, theyre really quiet and dont produce a mass amount of heat when in use. Vibration is your least of worries (hell thats never even crossed my mind in a mac pro desktop).
 
I have an external drive that I store all of music and music (porn is on a different computer-haha). I do a lot of encoding and burning, it just seems like the Mac is not as snappy as it should be or could be.

I like the idea of a solid state drive but can't seem to find anything within the same/equivalent price range...

Btw-sorry if this is the wrong forum, kind of new to posting but a long time reader of the forum.
 
wikus said:
Youre better off getting a small SSD drive only for your OS and applications and using a secondary hard drive to store your data (music, movies, documents, porn, etc).

RAM isnt going to make any snappier unless you max out your RAM by running many applications at once or heavy documents (100mb+ PSD files, for example and lots of memory allocated to photoshop)

Btw, wrong forum.

----------

Also, get the 7,200rpm drive. Slower drive won't do you much good, the 7,200rpm drives are significantly faster. Try going for a Western Digital Black. The WD Green drives are OK, I have one and its read/write speeds are around 90mb/s.

Vibration from them isnt an issue, theyre really quiet and dont produce a mass amount of heat when in use. Vibration is your least of worries (hell thats never even crossed my mind in a mac pro desktop).
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure OP is talking about a MBP. Anyhow, you really can't do anything about encoding times. That's all CPU (which you can't change).
 
ShakyJay said:
I have a MacPro (mid 2010) I bought the 256gb hard drive model, as it was the one that was in my budget at the time. I absolutely love it, however after playing on my cousins brand new MacPro I am considering upgrading my memory.

I was thinking about a 500-1tb Sata hard drive and upgrading the memory to 8gb.

Do you think that this will make the Mac quicker (snappier), and will it help with the encoding of movies? I do a lot of movie making/copying.

Do you have any recommendations for hard drives?

I have read a lot of reviews and have done a ton of research on different drives. I am not sure if the 7200RPM will cause a lot more vibration and noise or should I just stick with the 5600? I use the Mac on a daily basis, so noise and heat need to be at a minimum.

Just basically need someone to give me some recommendations as I am in a sea of drives and need some direction.

Thanks fellow Mac'ers
Click to expand...
256GB HD makes it sounds like you already have an SSD(I could be wrong). If you "upgraded" your SSD to a 500gb spinning platter hard drive your computer would actually be slower.

More RAM is only useful if you multi-task a whole lot or run very intensive applications, what are you page ins and outs? You may not even need it, and if you don't need it, upgrading won't make the slightest difference to you.
 
snaky69 said:
256GB HD makes it sounds like you already have an SSD(I could be wrong). If you "upgraded" your SSD to a 500gb spinning platter hard drive your computer would actually be slower.

More RAM is only useful if you multi-task a whole lot or run very intensive applications, what are you page ins and outs? You may not even need it, and if you don't need it, upgrading won't make the slightest difference to you.
Click to expand...



No I don't have a SSD now. How do I find my page ins and outs?
 
iisforiphone said:
apps-utilities-activity monitor-memory tab

page outs will reset on a reboot, but it should remain at 0 throught the day if your not running out of RAM
Click to expand...


So I checked it out and it here are my readings:

VM size 173.74GB
Page ins: 1.40GB (10bytes/sec-this fluctuates)
Page outs: 3.47GB
Swap used: 18.5 MB

Free: 1.21GB
Wired: 830MB
Active: 1.20GB
Inactive: 791.6MB
Used: 2.79GB
.....
So with those kinds of stats what do you recommend, do I need to clean up my system? Am I running out of memory? What can I do??

Thanks for the help.
 
I also agree to jack. Strontium has got a wide range of mac memory, all decently priced. I have used one and it is giving me good performance overall. i guess you need to check in their main page and see which one is best suting your Mac and order.(Stronitum apple series)
 
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