SSD or RAM for Mac on Lion

On a system running Lion OS X:
1. Every app even if closed with the red traffic light still remains live on the RAM, so opening an app again happens instantaneously.
2. Shutdown and reboot rarely if ever happens. So i only sleep which also happens instantaneously.

Moreover keeping my HDD would give me more storage and higher write speeds than the SSD. Considering these, wouldn't getting more RAM be better than buying an (expensive) SSD ?

 

For me SSD is ultimately better, since i
a) work with large files
b) do some gaming, loading huge stages
c) need to reboot win-mac-win-mac rather frequently

You are slightly condradicting yourself. From what i can tell you dont want cheap 120gb ssd because apparently you work with a lot of data, like 500-750gb? And there you are saying that all your data actually will fit in your ram? Lets not forget that upgrading ram 6 to 16gb isnt cheap as well.

Sure you can put iTunes into Ram but when you are actually opening a video or even hd audio it can happen fast or instantly. And SSD is all about doing stuff instantly rather then fast.

 

If you can afford it, a SSD is the very best upgrade you can make to improve performance.

Increasing your RAM past 4gb will have limited effect on performance (unless you often use very RAM intensive applications).

 

No it won't, as the HDD must load these applications in the first place. Ultimately, an SSD provides a greater performance boost than a RAM upgrade beyond 4GB unless you're running memory-intensive programs.

 

Really? I didn't realize that hard drives could write at 500MB/s (actually more like 470MB/s with my SSD, about 30MB/s shy of the advertised speeds). Even slower SSDs with 200MB/s write speeds are going to be faster than HDDs. Hard drives currently have two benefits over SSDs: they are available in higher capacities and they have a much better $/GB ratio. Other than that, SSDs have far more benefits.

As previously stated, putting an SSD in a MBP is going to benefit it more than upgrading the RAM beyond 4GB. I put 8GB in my MBP simply because I am often running Excel (with solver), MATLAB, OriginLab, LaTeX, Word, and iTunes all at once. I was getting close to filling up the 4GB of RAM that came with my MBP. I definitely couldn't notice a performance increase after upgrading to 8GB of RAM but my SSD drive added a lot more. It takes OS X Lion ~2 seconds to open most apps, around 14 seconds to perform a full restart, around 12 seconds to cold boot, copying files around in different folders on the SSD is blazingly fast (much faster than any hard drive), there aren't any moving parts so I don't have to worry about carrying my MBP open whenever I am moving it from one table to another, and I can keep going on.

The only downside to SSDs, aside from wonky controller and firmware issues (which also plague some hard drives), is that they cost an arm and a leg. You can easily spend $800 on a 500GB SSD. Having said that, if you keep your media files on an external hard drive (1TB goes for $100 and that is with a FireWire 800 cable), you shouldn't have any capacity issues.

 

Also, if you do end up exhausting your RAM occasionally, paging to disk will be much faster with an SSD.

 

It technically depends, but let's be general about it.

Without getting into the details, if you have 2 GB of memory, upgrading to 4 GB of memory is probably the most cost effective way to improve performance.

2GB -> 4GB: small cost, small benefit

If you already have 4 GB of memory, the next cost effective choice would be the SSD over 6-8GB of memory.

HDD -> SSD: large cost, large benefit
4 GB -> 6+ GB: small cost, very little benefit

---

SSD are faster than HDD in read and write speeds and seek times (critical)
---

If you're loading up 4 GB of stuff into memory and the hard drive has to keep paging out the memory, then upgrading to 4 GB will be a large benefit.

If you're not using more than 2 GB (or don't need to be using more than 2 GB) of memory, then you'll see basically no benefit. Even with a bunch of applications open, this very well may be the case. In fact, it's almost certainly the case except for rare, specific, circumstances.

---

SSD will be a very large help regardless of what you're doing.

 

Ok, obviously I was ve ry wrong. Thanks for correcting me guys!