Which offers me the best speed increase

ding76uk

ding76uk

Messages
4,096
Name
Carl
Edit My Images
Yes
I have a core duo unibody macbook (not pro) and am wanting to get a little more speed out of it.

I am weghing up between more ram and an SSD

Currently I have 2GB and it maxes out at 4

The other option is to install a 64 gig SSD as a system drive and use NAS for any major storage of Itunes etc.

I know TRIM is not supported in current OSX but it will be in Lion. Will not having it at the moment effect the drive after TRIM is installed in Lion?

Cheers in advance for the help.

Carl
 
Difficult one that. What's your memory usage like when running the apps you want to run? The key thing is if 4G is enough so you never get swapped to disk, the 4G may be the best option.
 
The slowest part of any computer is the hard disk.

If you run out of RAM, it write to the hard disk

When you load photoshop etc. it is reading from the hard disk.

Has to be hard disk for me, it will speed up everything.

Going from 2Gb to 4Gb on a PC on Windows Vista/7 would give a small increase in performance. An SSD would give a huge boost in performance.
 
ding76uk said:
What would be the best 64 gig ssd to go for? I have not really looked heavily into them before. What have people used and what is there to look out for?
Click to expand...
Crucial C300 or OCZ Vertex
 
remember OSX doesnt support TRIM until supposedly Lion (supposedly as ive not seen any offical blurb but people say it will be there), so you may end up with performance degredation in a short period with an SSD.
 
neil_g said:
remember OSX doesnt support TRIM until supposedly Lion (supposedly as ive not seen any offical blurb but people say it will be there), so you may end up with performance degredation in a short period with an SSD.
Click to expand...

Thats the only thing that concerns me at the moment, will there be any lasting damage to the drive or will issues be resolved once TRIM is available in Lion?
 
once you start seeing slowdowns the recommended process is to run the manufacturers wiper/cleaner utils, i do note however these tools arent available for OSX at least by OCZ so it may involve putting it in a Windows box but then that wont be able to be read in Mac format..
 
just to add, there are people that do use SSD in macs and apparently dont see an issue. but then slowdowns occur during lots of writes and deletes so not everyone will see it.

however if it were me personally id wait and see if lion supports trim.
 
Haven't seen any issues with performance on a SSD installed on OSX over the 12 months I've been using them, but even if it does slow down it's still going to be faster than a HDD.
 
neil_g said:
just to add, there are people that do use SSD in macs and apparently dont see an issue. but then slowdowns occur during lots of writes and deletes so not everyone will see it.

however if it were me personally id wait and see if lion supports trim.
Click to expand...

Allegedly, snow leopard supports TRIM since 10.6.6, according to the WIKI.
 
Me neither. According to a forum I've just been reading, the code for it is in there since Leopard 10.5.7, but that could be hogwash as well.

it would be nice of Apple to put it in, now that they sell computers with SSDs as well.
 
trencheel303 said:
Me neither. According to a forum I've just been reading, the code for it is in there since Leopard 10.5.7, but that could be hogwash as well.

it would be nice of Apple to put it in, now that they sell computers with SSDs as well.
Click to expand...

The new MBP come with TRIM support, but apparently it's only supporting Apple supplied drives at the moment. So many rumours flying as usual.
 
I'm running OSX 10.6.6 on a MBA (2010) with a 256GB SSD (albeit it directly on the motherboard) and no TRIM support :(
 
Back OT ;)

At a guess, the MBA has the flash soldered onto the board so you can't call it an SSD as you wouldn't be able to change it for a bigger one if you wanted to.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top