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$100 to spend: Upgrade Hard Drive or RAM?


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Just upgraded to MacBook Pro i5 2.3GHz

 

In the fantasy world where I find $100 under the sofa, am I better off with upgrading the hard drive to the Seagate Maximus XT 7200rpm hybrid drive

 

OR

 

bumping the RAM from the current 4GB up to 8GB?

 

Only 3rd party plugs are Pianoteq 3.6, M-tron, MiniMonsta and VB3.

 

I have Kontakt, but it didn't perform well with my 2006 MacBook. Would like to have better strings and horns for wedding band gigs, but those are only about 20% of what I do live.

 

Thanks,

 

Stewart

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Personally I'd go from 4GB to 8GB memory.... Apart from better overall OS X performance.. you would then also benefit from better performance with EXS

 

or...

 

With Kontakt if you run Logic in 64 bit mode (assuming you are running Logic 9)

 

or.....

 

In the case of Kontakt... run the Kontakt Memory Server if you decide to stick with Logic in 32 bit mode or you are running an earlier version of Logic like v8 for example.

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  • 2 weeks later...
have you considered getting an external hardrive. I do a lot of video work and with an external hardrive you have the added security of not losing anything you save if your mac or pc crashes. I recently bought a two terabyte western digital external hardrive for less than $100. Just a thought. Hope this helps.
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I would definitely go for upgrading the RAM. In your dream world, there will always be another $100 somewhere down the track so you can get an external hard drive for extra redundancy. Chances are you won't be anywhere near capacity for hard disk usage yet (as it's a new Macbook).
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In the real world, you are probably going to do both. The order I would do them in is to get the Ram first, and then the Hard Drive. There are options available for the hard drive that you can tailor to your creative work flow and archiving needs.

 

In the fantasy world where I find $100 under the sofa,

Might as well check under the armchair, bed, car seats, washing machine....

Since it's a fantasy world, why stop at a hundred bucks! :)

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Unless you are a heavy games player and you bootcamp into windows to do so.. or you do a huge amount of heavy duty video work, Video Ram is pretty much inconsequential compared to System Ram....

 

You could have 2GB of Video Ram (Latest i7 iMac and AMD Radeon HD 6970M 2GB for example ) but without a good amount of System Ram you would be wasting your time... and money. I'd spend the extra on System Ram any day of the week!

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