RAM/HDD upgrade worth it?

[pitts2282]

Getting ready to upgrade to the Macbook Pro, wondered if it was worth the big time $$ to upgrade to 4gb of RAM or the 7200rpm 160gb hdd. Want to be able to run leapord/vista with NO lags, and worried about the ram requirements. In addition, would the increase in speed from 5400 to 7200rpm be noticable, and if so, how much more of a battery drain to spin the platter faster? thanks for the info..

 

[killedbyinterne]

If you really want to upgrade to 4 GB then do it yourself. Apple overcharges for the RAM upgrade. Although, 2 GB will run Leopard just fine. You only really need that much RAM if you're running some intense apps. If you're going to upgrade to the 7200 RPM then go ahead and do it through Apple. Its a reasonable price for the upgrade.

 

[pitts2282]

If you really want to upgrade to 4 GB then do it yourself. Apple overcharges for the RAM upgrade. Although, 2 GB will run Leopard just fine. You only really need that much RAM if you're running some intense apps. If you're going to upgrade to the 7200 RPM then go ahead and do it through Apple. Its a reasonable price for the upgrade.

thanks for the info, agree with what you said, the only issue now is the fact that I can save over $300 from MacMall, but I can't get the upgraded hard drive (could do it myself but I've read about the HDD upgrade on the Macbook Pro and it doesn't sound too appealing, not to mention void your warranty....) Any idea of the 7200 being noticably faster or draining the battery more?

 

[killedbyinterne]

According to the XBench results located on the last page of this ExtremeTech article there is a significant difference.

 

[TheInvsbleMan]

I was going to get the 7200 RPM drive but I would need to order online and at the time the ship time was 6-8 weeks I believe and I didn't want to wait. So I just picked up the 5400, and I never have any lags at all. I can't compare it to the 7200, but my 5400 runs awesome.

 

[XJ-linux]

Dellstore.com is selling the 160GB Seagate Momentus 2.5" SATA 7200.2 at about $110 right now with free shipping. I just bought and installed it on my MBP and Xbench scores went from around 80 to 92. In the real world, everything seems to run quicker, including booting the MBP. No more beachballs for me. May have something to do with the fact that UNIX OS's like OS X use paging space pretty liberally. Roughly 2x your RAM is dedicated to paging space on the HDD. The install is easy on the MBP and the average person should be able to do it in an hour. Just my 2 cents worth. Remember, it only voids the warranty in that you have to remove and replace the original HDD if you need to send it back to Apple for some reason. There's no clause that says you can't open the MBP for whatever reason. ie: you replace the HDD and later your RAM goes bad. If you local dealer can just replace the RAM you have no problem. If it needs to ship to Apple because say, the logic board or the RAM sockets are bad, then you have to stick the original HDD back in before mailing it back.
-Dave/XJ

 

[kaidomac]

Absolutely. But install both of them yourself! I just installed 4 gigs of ram and a 200gb 7200rpm hard drive in my 2.2ghz MBP. The Hitachi hard drive is the fastest laptop drive currently available, even faster than the 160gb Seagate that Apple sells - and you don't have to wait so long for it! Here are some links:

http://www.xpcgear.com/0a50940.html

http://eshop.macsales.com/item/Other World Computing/53IM2DDR4GBK/

Here is an installation video:

http://media.macsales.com/highres.html

 

[pitts2282]

thanks for all the info, guess I'm going to get it from MacMall for the discount (and cheaper Parallels and Vista) then purchase the upgrades and do them on my own. A little scared about starting all of this 2 months before the new OS, but I guess it shouldn't be to difficult to upgrade...

 

[XJ-linux]

Look at it this way. Doing the upgrades yourself, you're saving cash. Plus, you can do all of your config and tweaking stuff on the original HDD. Then clone it to the new one leaving yourself a verified working backup copy to box up and stash away. This could be useful if the new OS X upgrade bombs the data on your newly installed disk. You can always swap the old (verified working) disk and be back up and running in an hour if needed.
-Dave