Laptop Upgrades

[OverTurn]

I just ran out of disk space on my Macbook. Trying to get my thoughts in order on how I want to upgrade. I currently have a 500GB internal drive which i back up onto a 500GB external drive and 4gb (2GBx2) of RAM. My current plans are to max out the ram at 8GB, and then buy a SSD for the OS, apps, and the current batch of photos I'm working on. Upgrade the internal HD to a 1-2TB drive and get a matching external as a backup to that. Anyone have any advice on SSDs, specifically if I'm going to be running apps like PS and LR and working on files from the SSD, as well as booting Mac OS X. There are literally thousands of options for SSDs and I know reliability (write cycles) might be an issue depending on the drive? I'm a little baffled by all the options.

Or is there a better plan? Skip the SSD and just max out the RAM and internal disk space?

If this would be better in Tech Talk fine, but I'm specifically concerned about the photography ramifications of the upgrade, both in terms of robustness and performance.

[systemoverblow'd]

I'm confused... How are you putting in an SSD and a 2TB drive? Are you pulling your SuperDrive and getting a data doubler kit from OWC?

Don't worry about r/w cycles if you are using your 2TB as your scratch disk. Besides, many of those cycle issues people were bitching about early on have been improved apron.

I'll tell you, an SSD will be the most significant upgrade you could do to a lagging machine to speed it up. It won't help really inside the app, but launching and OS responsiveness will certainly feel much better. So snappiness the SSD will help but when working on pics, you will benefit more from the ram than the SSD.

EDIT - I guess being around Boston the iPhone automagically capitalizes SSD!

[Tippster]

What the hell is "Clogging" your HDD? Get another external drive (not your time machine drive) and export all the files you're not currently working on, then delete them from your HDD. I'm assuming it's stills and video files, not all music...

[The Suit]

8GB RAM upgrade will make a huge difference. Not so sure about the HD upgrade. I second advres's question - how do you install both a solid state drive and a mongo hard disk, too? If you do a clean install because of the drive upgrade, that might help as much as the new hardware. If I were you, I'd probably just try to clean up the internal drive and move all the excess shit to externals.

I try not to keep photo and video source files on my laptop. All that stuff goes on network attached storage.

[OverTurn]

I'm confused... How are you putting in an SSD and a 2TB drive? Are you pulling your SuperDrive and getting a data doubler kit from OWC?

8GB RAM upgrade will make a huge difference. Not so sure about the HD upgrade. I second advres's question - how do you install both a solid state drive and a mongo hard disk, too? If you do a clean install because of the drive upgrade, that might help as much as the new hardware. If I were you, I'd probably just try to clean up the internal drive and move all the excess shit to externals.

I try not to keep photo and video source files on my laptop. All that stuff goes on network attached storage.

Yeah, something similar to the data doubler. Superdrive is broken and I have an external one to plug in but I haven't used it in months. I won't miss the broken optical drive.

What the hell is "Clogging" your HDD? Get another external drive (not your time machine drive) and export all the files you're not currently working on, then delete them from your HDD. I'm assuming it's stills and video files, not all music...

Almost all stills. Some video. I'd thought about getting just another big HDD, but I do want a performance bump here too.

[Fenris]

Samsung 830 and the OWC drives seem to be the best SSDs for Macs still. SandForce drives other than OWC seem to not get great reviews with OS X, though it's kinda hard to compare the OWC reviews. Probably can't go wrong with the newer Intel drives either.

If you are using Aperture get a big external and split your library. I only keep the current month or two's library internal and everything else lives on the external. Also would make sense for the dual internal drive route too. Probably can do a similar thing with Lightroom.