SSD or 8 GB extra - which makes the biggest difference?

[febrik]

Hi, first off, sorry for writing in English. Hope I don't break any forum rules by doing so. My Finnish is still at an "hyvä päivä"-level.

I have my heart set on buying an iMac 21,5 late 2013 (finally 802.11ac!). Aiming for the entry level version and now I'm considering upgrades. I took for granted that it would be and extra 8 GB or RAM (to a total of 16), but the more I read I'm starting to wonder if a 256 GB SSD upgrade wouldn't make an even bigger difference? It seems to have a massive impact on e.g. boot times and general "snappyness" of the system. I'm breaking the bank as it is, so I have to pick and choose.

And if (big if) the focus shifts to the hard drives and storage space isn't really an issue (I'm handling that externally), would you go for the 256 GB SSD or the Fusion Drive? Considering that the price tag is the same, that is. Have I understood correctly that the Fusion Drive basically is a larger 5400 rpm drive with 128 GB SSD, or are there other benefits? And no matter if you go SSD or Fusion the general idea is that the OS is installed on the SSD, right?

I'm not doing anything extremely taxing on the system on a normal day. Photoshopping RAW-pictures and mirroring HD-content on the AppleTV (fingers crossed for an 802.11ac version of ATV soon). But that's about it, if my wife's habit of leaving two million pinterest tabs open at the same time doesn't count. No gaming really (one of the reasons I think I'll do just fine with the entry level imac).

Really grateful for any input. And also (and this is sort of the reason why I'm harassing you in English in a Finnish forum), do you have any experience of the mac service (upgrading) at Verkkokauppa in Helsinki? Any reason not to use them?

http://www.verkkokauppa.com/fi/product/ ... ytatietoko

Cheers,
Fredrik

[kamina]

Hi, first off, sorry for writing in English. Hope I don't break any forum rules by doing so. My Finnish is still at an "hyvä päivä"-level.

I have my heart set on buying an iMac 21,5 late 2013 (finally 802.11ac!). Aiming for the entry level version and now I'm considering upgrades. I took for granted that it would be and extra 8 GB or RAM (to a total of 16), but the more I read I'm starting to wonder if a 256 GB SSD upgrade wouldn't make an even bigger difference? It seems to have a massive impact on e.g. boot times and general "snappyness" of the system. I'm breaking the bank as it is, so I have to pick and choose.

The amount of ram your system has makes no difference unless it runs out. It's not like processor speed where an increase will be visible in most tasks, rather it's just a fast storage for stuff that is currently running (applications and their data mainly). This question is pretty difficult, as it really depends on what is done with the computer, and how lazy you are. Currently very few people will benefit from having more then 8GB of ram except in cases where a lot of different applications are left running in the background. On the other hand applications seem to be using more and more memory and who knows where we'll be in 2-3 years.

When I had 4GB of memory I noticed problems when I had two browsers, two email clients, multiple apps etc. In this case I could have just closed some of the background apps and everything is snappy again. Another case where I noticed the lack of ram was when running a windows virtual and any moderately heavy other application, the memory was just not enough and the only solution would be to shutdown one of the applications (which I needed to be running) or bear the slow performance. I would imagine the first case (leaving a lot of applications running) is far more common with 8GB of memory, so you can always solve it by shutting some of them down.

The speed of the SSD affects a lot of things, not just starting up the computer but also starting up applications, the user interface of things like iTunes and Aperture where thumbnail icons are read from disk while scrolling along. If you don't shut down your computer for the night and always have the same applications running then they will be cached in memory and the difference will be smaller. It also affects noise as there are no moving parts.

And if (big if) the focus shifts to the hard drives and storage space isn't really an issue (I'm handling that externally), would you go for the 256 GB SSD or the Fusion Drive? Considering that the price tag is the same, that is. Have I understood correctly that the Fusion Drive basically is a larger 5400 rpm drive with 128 GB SSD, or are there other benefits? And no matter if you go SSD or Fusion the general idea is that the OS is installed on the SSD, right?

With Fusion drive the operating system is transparently keeping the often used smaller files on the SSD drive and rarely used or bigger files on the slower drive. It works pretty well, and of course get's better over time when it gets more statistics on file usage. In practice your operating system files (the relevant ones) will most certainly end up on the SSD. For something like iTunes the config files, thumbnail images (displayed always on the gui) and often listened music files will end up on SSD, rarely listened music on the slower drive. The only thing you are gaining over a traditional SSD is that you can fit a lot more files, resulting in easier management of files.

I'd like to see a bigger SSD in the Fusion drive, but based on my own experience it does work quite well and in most cases the performance difference to a pure SSD solution is small (at least after a week or two of use). If you are comfortable using external drives for storage and don't need more then 256GB of internal storage then I would still take that path, but really think forward. I have 150GB of photos and home videos and quite a lot of music so I end up needing quite a lot of storage... For this Fusion drive is great as it will automatically keep the larger raw files on the slower disk and all the previews on the SSD. I use my external drives for backups rather then storing the files (makes life more simple).

I'm not doing anything extremely taxing on the system on a normal day. Photoshopping RAW-pictures and mirroring HD-content on the AppleTV (fingers crossed for an 802.11ac version of ATV soon). But that's about it, if my wife's habit of leaving two million pinterest tabs open at the same time doesn't count. No gaming really (one of the reasons I think I'll do just fine with the entry level imac).

Photoshop will be just fine with 8GB of ram unless you are working with very big raw files, same thing with pinterest etc, but of course the habit of keeping many applications / tabs open is what usually causes memory to run out some time in the future when applications start using up even more memory.

Really grateful for any input. And also (and this is sort of the reason why I'm harassing you in English in a Finnish forum), do you have any experience of the mac service (upgrading) at Verkkokauppa in Helsinki? Any reason not to use them?

http://www.verkkokauppa.com/fi/product/ ... ytatietoko

Cheers,
Fredrik

Never bought a mac from verkkokauppa but did buy other things. My only bad experiences with warranty are from over 10 years ago, I feel things work pretty well with them but occasionally I see people with bad experiences (don't know if there is any place that would not have the same thing).

[febrik]

Thank you so much for you thorough reply! All things considered I might in the end lean more towards the fusion drive. Since it will be more of a family computer, and not my own playground, it sounds like an easier way of keeping things sorted (compared to manually choosing where to store which files).

Off course, more moving parts mean more things that can break, but with thorough back-ups it should feel safe enough. The 128 GB SSD in the FD should be plenty for what I'm using it for, and there is always the option of getting more external SSD storage.

Much appreciated!
/f