Ram and HDD Upgrade Suggestions?

Hii I have a 13" Macbook Pro 2.26Ghz with 2gb of ram and 160gb HDD

I am thinking i want 4Gb Of ram and a 500Gb hard drive.

Wondering what you guys would recommend for ram looking for 4GB 2Gbx2Gb

And Also Was wondering about HDD I can use any Laptop hard drive as long as its SATA right?

If so i was looking at the

Newegg.com - Western Digital Scorpio Black WD5000BEKT 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive -Bare Drive

And they also Have the WD Blue 500GB drive i was wondering if there was a big difference

I also want something that doesn't Suck a lot of power and is quite

Thanks for the suggestions!

OWC aka MacSales. <- Linky.

So, which is better, RAM or faster HDD? I have a MBP i7 with the standard 4 GB RAM and 500 GB 5,400 RPM drive - I ordered 8 GB of Mushkin memory, but would a faster hard drive be better (no not SSD)?

cwall64 said:

So, which is better, RAM or faster HDD? I have a MBP i7 with the standard 4 GB RAM and 500 GB 5,400 RPM drive - I ordered 8 GB of Mushkin memory, but would a faster hard drive be better (no not SSD)?

Click to expand...

What do you mean by "better"? If you mean faster...unless you're doing some hard core computing (and you already have 4 gig of ram & a 500gig HD)...neither upgrade will really do anything for you other than make your wallet thinner!

- Nick

Sorry, looking back it was a little ambiguous! Most of my work is in VMware Fusion, and for play Adobe CS5 Design Premium (mostly Photoshop). I think that the memory will help with both of those programs, correct?

The higher the RPM the faster the HDD. There is also a down side to that of course. Heat for one thing, and also the life of the HDD can be shorten due to how fast it is spinning.

7200 RPM HDD since you don't want SSD.

A faster HDD would help with launching applications, reading, and writing to the disk faster. Hope that answers your question.

cwall64 said:

Sorry, looking back it was a little ambiguous! Most of my work is in VMware Fusion, and for play Adobe CS5 Design Premium (mostly Photoshop). I think that the memory will help with both of those programs, correct?

Click to expand...

Yes...more info is always better.

If you're doing a lot of hard drive accessing (opening & closing files a lot)...or opening lots of large files...a 7,200 rpm hard drive may help. As far as ram & Photoshop. Yes Photoshop seems to be one of those programs that seems to work better with more ram...but even Adobe says you only need 1 gig of ram:

system requirements | Adobe Photoshop CS5 Extended

But then this also depends on how many files you have open at the same time...and how large they are. One way to see how your ram is being used (when you have Photoshop & your Photoshop files open)...is go to the Apple Utility called "Activity Monitor", and click on the "System Memory" tab to see how your ram is being used. The less "free ram" you have...the more likely your computer may be running less efficiently.

Also remember...the best way to utilize your ram when you have "ram hungry" applications like Photoshop open...is don't have lots & lots of other programs open at the same time. That just eats up ram that photoshop can be using.

Doubling your ram from 4 to 8 gigabyte may help some...but it probably won't turn your computer into a "speed demon"...since a true speed increase requires a faster cpu or gpu.

Hope this helps,

- Nick

Well, maybe I wasted $250 on memory - we'll see... But, thanks for the input, I really have never looked at the Adobe systems reqs (i think they might just be a little misleading, in the age of 20+ mega-pixel DSLRs).