Improving Mac Speed

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Danny133

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Daniel
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I have a new 21.5'' iMac

Its the 3.06ghz version.

I have upgraded the RAM to 8GB .. however what else can i do to muscle it up?

Faster boot times would be nice :)
 
I have one of those too. Seriously though, why do you need more speed, mine is insanely quick with 4GB RAM!
 
SSD is that the only thing?

If so which one fits inside the iMac?

Id like to beef it up to a 1TB i think 2TB is too big ..

And any particular model?
 
Hey Danny, having seen all your Mac interest and threads I would say slow down! ;) I mean that in the nicest way!

Think what you need before you spend anymore, 4Gb should have been easily enough, do you need a 2Tb HDD?

Agree SSD is probably the biggest single increase in speed you can get now as I just installed one in an old Macbook and it's lightning (with only 2Gb RAM)
 
thanks roger ..

no i do not want 2TB :)

i think 1TB will be sufficient reason i believe this is because i wnat to edit and create HD movies so space is a must ..

i am good on a windows but on a mac its a different kettle so im quite new and getting used to it :)

anything that can increase a boot up time and app launch time is great for me ..

can you reccomend a 1TB drive?

a SSD is out of the Q .. a 1TB is several thousand
 
Oh btw go into System Prefs > Energy Saver and then Schedule, you can make it wake up before you do so no need to worry about boot up times ;)

Before that System Prefs > Accounts > Login Items and add all the apps you want to start at boot ;)
 
keeping your desktop clear is a huge help in start-up and ram saving. Keeping a good spare amount of hard disk space available for ram swapping in photoshop and other apps helps the speed of the apps. With photoshop specifically (but works for many other creative apps) keeping brushes, gradients, filters and fonts etc. to a minimum helps to speed up application start up.
So all in all it's good "housekeeping" practice that will help :-)
 
internal :) replacing the standard HDD

sweet lol boot it up as i wake up and go to sleep as i go to bed :P
 
Nookie said:
Be aware that SSD drives don't last as long as normal ones.
Click to expand...

Plenty long enough though...

2 Million write cycles (MLC) or 5 million (SLC) before wear is a lot of writes.

SLC units get used in SAN storage systems which get absolutely hammered on use, far more than a laptop or desktop PC which is possible switched off, or idle for the majority of its life.

SSD "wear" is FUD.

Taking the lowest of 2 million, and assuming perfect wear levelling in the firmware, you're looking at 5 decades of use at 80Mb/s on a 64GB

Or...

(2,000,000 x 65,536,000,000 x 8) / 80,000,000 = 1,638,400,000s of continued use

Divide that by
60 to give you the minutes
Then another 60 to give you the hours
Then another 24 to give you the days
Then 7 to give you the weeks
Then 52 to give you the years, which comes out at 52.

That's flat out usage.

Don't all rush to the shops now....

BTW, I wrote that in this thread back in May, and things have got cheaper since then...

http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=230500
 
if i can get a SSD for cheap id concider it lol but there mega bucks
 
Nookie said:
Be aware that SSD drives don't last as long as normal ones.
Click to expand...

The MTBF for SSDs have been supposedly improved in recent times by having reserve sectors like traditional platter drives.

One thing I can say for SSDs is that while they have great read times, their write times are pants, and I wouldn't recommend using one for everything. Unfortunately an iMac does not have two drive bays, so I'd just stick with a platter hard drive.

How long is it taking to boot anyway? It can't be much more than 30 seconds - heck, my Asus EEE running Tiger is up and running in about that.
 
WOW @ crucial


orderd 2x4GB @ 4PM yesterday and they were here at 9AM this morning!

first time ive ever touched inside a PC/Mac and although its so simple a retard could do it .. im pleased i got it right first time! woop 8GB in the iMac for under £60 :)
 
8gb? Blimey, I have 4 in my 24 inch 3.06 dually and that seems quick enough for me...certainly after migrating from PC!
 
it was cheap enough and its done so im chuffed :)

id like a bigger hard drive but that looks a bit complex =/
 
Just be happy with what you have - none of my storage hard drives are bigger than 160GB, none of my RAMs higher than 1GB, I don't even have dual core processors, and I'm fine!

Of all the time you've spend on here pondering, I doubt you'll ever get it back by shaving a few seconds off your boot time.
 
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i am extremely!

but i want to run powerful things on here and i want this to become a hardcore media center streaming device so i want it to be able to manage
 
JasonRS said:
So just a big file server then, the Mac is overkill for that, you can buy a £200 NAS that'll do the job just fine.

Your network is likely to be the limiting factor, if anything.
Click to expand...

i need some fibre optic hardcore wiring i know .. BUT i love macs .. i hate windows so i had to buy an imac!

i need to buy a portable hard drive so shall i buy a case and then a harddrive and build it?

or shall i buy it ready built?

whats cheaper?
 
Fibre optic hardcore wiring???

...I think a gigabit network should be ample.
 
agreed a mac is overkill for a media streamer. you can get one fully capably of playing back 1080 content for 200-300 pounds.

and a network of 200mbps should be find for that sort of playback too.
 
none lol proabably is doing something somewhere in there but i cant notice it
 
Try getting Snow Leopard Cache Cleaner & run it regularly it keeps the speed up & fixes those small problems before they become a big problem
 
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