
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.
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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.
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