RAM upgrade and/or SSD drive – what’s the benefit?

A SSD drive and a RAM upgrade will boost performance by up to 70%. Let us show you how.

MyOrderStore- Laptop Service | Computer Repair | Parts Shop | Software | Windows & Antivirus Installation Centre | Online/Onsite Support | Problem Solution Provider at Home providing best rates for Most Popular Companies like SanDisk, Seagate, WD,  Simtronics,  Kinston, Acer,  Lition, Micron, Consistent, HP, Toshiba etc in all capacities like 120GB, 128GB,  250GB,  256GB,  500GB, 1TB  for Best performance of your Laptops as well as Desktops, MacBooks etc. for all operating systems. 

What will investing in a SSD drive for your notebook actually give you in terms of performance improvement? We decided to do a field test and grabbed an aging MacBook Pro that our graphics designer uses to do work when he’s on the road. We used four scenarios to find out how much a RAM upgrade or a new SSD drive improves the system operating speed. We were really impressed by the results

Fast system boot

The difference can be immediately noticed when you switch on the MacBook Pro: the RAM-only upgrade results in a 25% faster system boot, the SSD upgrade noticeably reduces boot time by 54%.

Compared to the performance boost of a SSD, the “fully tuned” system (RAM upgrade plus SSD) only squeezes out 2 more seconds during system boot.

Performance boost during operation

As expected, the SSD results in a massive performance boost when working with the system: with the SSD installed, Photoshop CS5 starts 4 times faster than with the original HDD; the 1GB image file opens 3 times faster.

The RAM-only upgrade did not show any improvement in performance when we launched Photoshop. However, when opening the (relatively small) image file, we saw a discernible 37% improvement. Nevertheless, the user still has to wait 10 seconds longer for the file to open than when the HDD is upgraded to SSD (irrespective of whether 2 or 8GB of RAM are installed).

Professional desktop publishing (DTP) users, in particular, will benefit enormously from installing a SSD.

An additional plus from the point of view of our graphics designer: whereas the performance of the original system was just about good enough for Photoshop CS3 (CS5 was pretty sluggish on the original machine), after the upgrades, Photoshop CS5 can be used productively.

Conclusion

When you use your notebook primarily for applications that perform only few read/write operations on the disk drive (e. g. surfing, e-mail, word processing), upgrading the RAM to the maximum will give you a discernible improvement in performance.

As our test results show, installing a SSD and the maximum RAM will considerably speed up even an ageing notebook: the SSD provides a substantial performance boost, and adding RAM will get the most out of the system. So, our graphics designer was quite happy to delay investing in a new MacBook Pro for use on the road. His “late 2008” MacBook Pro sporting 8GB of RAM, 840 Pro SSD and a freshly installed operating system was more than enough for his DTP assignments.