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Rant: my 2011 MacBook booted faster from a $23 SSD than from the RAM upgrade I did first
Ordered the RAM first because everyone on forums said RAM was the bottleneck. 8GB kit arrived, installed it, boot time barely moved. Still 2 plus minutes to a usable desktop. Then a buddy who fixes old Macs in Portland shipped me a cheap 240GB SSD and a screwdriver for the swap. Same laptop, same OS, boots in about 25 seconds now. I keep reading that RAM matters more on these old Core 2 machines, but for what I do (browser, docs, some photos) the drive was the real fix. Was it the same for you, or did RAM end up mattering more once you already had an SSD in?
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rowank694d ago
Yeah the RAM thing gets repeated so much online that people skip right past the drive. I went through the same mess on a 2009 white MacBook, dropped in 8GB and it booted about as slow as before, then a $30 Kingston SSD cut it from over two minutes down to like 20 seconds. The reason is that a spinning drive is the slowest part in the whole machine by a mile, so the CPU sits there waiting on reads no matter how much RAM you have. RAM helps more once you're already on an SSD and you're running a bunch of tabs or apps at the same time, but for raw boot speed the drive wins every time.
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