I have a early 2011 Macbook Pro that is stock with no upgrades. I have recently got into a lot of photo and DVD editing, and have a big problem with performance!! I am trying to decide on more ram or SSD? Doing this on a big budget cause I have twins on the way!! But i need to be able to edit without taking forever to load and edit!!
I've looked at crucial memory upgrades:
-RAM 2x8 (16GB) for 131$ 2x4 (8GB) 75$
-SSD M500 120GB for 120$ and 240GB for 200$
so any help would be greatly appreciated!! ;D
How much RAM do you have currently? That's really the key question.
If you have 4 GB of RAM already, more RAM will likely not help.
Even if you have 2 GB of RAM, it's likely to be a marginal boost.
If you want to know for sure, fire up your video editor with a project, then start up Activity Monitor (in Utilities). Look at the amount of INACTIVE system memory. If it's significant, like > 1 GB, you don't need RAM. If it's low, like < 100 MB, then more RAM might help.
Personally, I would go with the SSD. It will make your video projects load a lot faster and it will also make the rest of your system FLY. Note also that many video editors do not just load all the clips for a project. They dynamically load and unload video as needed so a SSD will make a huge difference for that.
...do you people think you can drop 30 GB on a timeline and it's all loaded in RAM? hahahaha. No.
Yes, you should go with the 240 GB. 120 GB will fill up fast.