Help with upgrading hdd and ram?

Ok well I have decided to order a 13 inch macbook pro 2.26 ghz

here are the specs

# 2.26GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
# 2GB 1066MHz DDR3 SDRAM - 2x1GB
# 160GB Serial ATA Drive @ 5400 rpm
# SuperDrive 8x (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW)
# None
# Backlit Keyboard (English) / User's Guide
# iWork '09 preinstalled

price - $1,248.00

Now I was originally going to upgrade RAM and my hdd on the apple site but it is overpriced so I'm now asking you guys what brands of RAM are good in terms of speed/price ratio

I want 4gb of RAM total (does this mean I have to buy 2x 2gb sticks of RAM?)

And I want a good brand of SSD that will work well (also I heard that there was some bottleneck limiting something to 1.5 instead of 3? can somebody expain this to me?)

Do ya'll think that maybe in a month or so ssd proces will be cheaper? and will the newer ssd be faster?

 

Pretty much any Ram with a lifetime warranty is good. GSkill, Corsair, Crucial, OCZ, etc,etc are all good. And yes, you will need to buy a 2x2GB Ram kit since you will be getting 2x1GB of ram.

For the SSDs the only thing I can think of is that I guess some were limited to using SATA I instead of SATA II ( 1.5GBPS vs 3GBPS ), im not sure which drives these were, so someone else more versed will have to help you on this.

Edit - After a quick look of the Mac forums, it seems that the 13" MPB is limited to 1.5GBPs, here is the thread.

 

thank you for you're help,

btw would it be better to buy 1 stick of 4 gb ram and latr upgrade? so basically
is 2x 2gb ram better than 2x 4gb ram ( 5gb ram actuallybecause + 1 of the default sticks)

and do 4gb ram sticks cost a lot more?

Rep + if you can answer this

 

4GB SO-DIMMs are very expensive; around $300 from online retailers if I remember correctly.

As for which is better, I believe ram running in dual channel is a bit faster ( though, even benchmarks show up only a 3% or so increase in memory intensive applications, so its not ground breaking ), but capacity is generally more worth while than dual channel. So this would be up to you, though in my opinion, 4GB of ram is plenty.

Edit - It seems on newegg the lowest is $135 ( though running at 533mhz ), and after that the 800mhz is $175, the aforementioned $300 is likely from an 8GB kit ( 2x4GB kit ).

 

Ok thanks you get rep +

I'll probably be going with 2x 2gb ram chips
now to find a couple
what is the difference of ddr2 vs ddr3?

 

DDR3 is basically better than DDR2. DDR3 is the successor to DDR2.

 

Though as a note, the performance gains are marginal at best.

 

well what is the price difference? should I just buy the 4gb ram ddr3 upgade from apple for 100 bucks?

 

Well you could probably get that cheaper from another site or ebay. To be honest I agree with NAS Ghost the performance is marginal for ordinary use.

 

actually I just realized i have an laptop at work and It has 4 gb of ram I can swap it with the ram in the macbook

ok now on to the ssd stuff

I plan to use an ssd if not now in the near future with the 13 inch macbook pro
the speed difference is just to much to pass up

i want to buy a top of the line ssd, now this bottleneck 1.5 thing, what will the affect be? like how will I see the differnce?

also will apple be able to fix this problem easy?

 

ok the 1.5 bottleneck is a SERIOUS pain in the @$$ if you want to go to a high end SSD. Can they fix it easily im saying NO as they have already released a firmware update which screws your unit up more than fixes it. and until it IS fixed anyone who wishes to go to an SSD should wait untill they prove a fix or wait untill the next refresh and hope its cleared up.

as for affecting your performance, using a high end SSD will be faster than the stock hard drive but you will be throttled by close to 50% of the actual speed on a functioning SATA 2 controller and with newer SSD's coming out ... it will be worse

 

Well the SSD will be better than the HDD on you MBP regardless of the 1.5. One different would be a faster loading time as there is no spin required with SSD.

You should look up the disadvantages and advantages of the SSD, there are on wikipedia.

As for Apple fixing this, it's not a problem per se. It's just a choice they made, I left an answer to that question in the other thread you asked it in.

 

this is true but the OP seemed interested in maximum performance and the 1.5 issue negates almost all advantages of a high end SSD, even the newer low grade units will approach the 1.5GB limit

 

is it possible for apple to fix it?

because if not I may buy the 15 inch (even though i don't to rather buy the 13 inch)

from what i hear the 15 inch is not limited buy this and can reach 3.

Now In the future I will want one of the fastest ssd I can get for multiple reasons, th main is that it makes your computer faster but look here: I don't want to spend 800 bucks and only get 400 bucks worth of processing power out of it

I want 800 bucks worth out of it

I also would like to get a great ssd because it's basically a good way to invest cash (in the sense that you can put the ssd into your newer computer if you get a new one eventually)

EDIT: actually btw are the 256 gb ssd drives that are around 700-800 bucks right now able to to even reach 1.5? because if not then I don't think I will worry about it. I mean I just saw a youtube video that was about ssd drives that reach 1.5 costing thousands of bucks and i don't care that much to spend that kind of money, here is the video http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=ssd+1.5&search_type=&aq=f

 

the new 256 drives can push 3GB let alone 1.5 and some 15" units are affected as well, the 17's seem to be the only ones unaffected that I have seen

 

wow, lost all faith in apple I;m going to call them myself and ask about it.

 

please do, I keep getting the runaround from all levels of support including Business support levels

 

If you want max performance, even with the cap, SSD is the way to go. There definitely will be a way around it since its not a hardware problem (chipset supports SATA/300) but software disabling it.

 

ok thank you

I thought it was a hardware problem

 

The OP wants to utilize the full SSD speeds and even with the 1.7 firmware update this seems to not be possible. for some of us the capping of drive speeds is totally unacceptable as we use drive intensive applications. and yes the chipset supports it as I have the identical chipset in other machines but the firmware fix did not work ... is it hardware, software or an engineering issue with the controller circuits as a whole?

 

Frankly, I would be shocked if most users will notice the difference in real life.

Do you think that SSD actually has sustained 1.5Gbps?

One of the fastest SSD drives in the world: http://www.gizmag.com/sandisk-announce-worlds-fastest-ssd/10763/

purports to have 200Mbs read/140Mbs write, but these are marketing numbers.

SATA 1.5Gbps is not really an issue unless you desperately want more than 150Mbytes/sec read speeds.

BTW, my old uMB is 3Gbps.

 

it was fixed with 1.7 firmware...however,so people report issues with couple of specific HDDs.And on the better site, fix is coming And I am shocked with the amount of disinformation in this thread-if you don't know something 100%, don't post or at least add "AFAIK"!

 

It's software-based since the chipset can physically support it. The problem is similar to Lenovo's T6x series capping the chipset's support.

Not really the fastest or even one of the fastest and definitely not marketing numbers. Sustained speeds can be seen when transferring large files. While sustained speeds are only one part of the equation, upon looking at benchmarks, usually all the speeds are slowed down for some reason. Aside from access times, random speeds are the most important number since loading an O/S utilizes these operations.