macbook promemory
I'm considering upgrading my end of 2006 MacBook Pro RAM. Yet I'm hesitating: it will not support 4GB of RAM, but only 3GB (I have 2x 1GB at the moment).
This means that each slot will have a different amount of memory, and I read somewhere that would prevent it from using double data rate or something like this.
Do you know if this decrease of performance is noticeable? Is it worth the extra 1GB of RAM?
I'd welcome advice; especially if you have done so yourself.
Thanks!
RAM still is a lot faster than any SSD which you use in your Mac. RAM has a shorter access times and much higher transfer rates:
[table]
The SATA interface by which the hard disk is connected limits the throughput to a theoretical maximum of 6Gbit/s (600MB/s) for SATA3.
You can determine how much the page outs are written to the disk by taking a look at the Activity Monitor. I try to keep the ratio at a maximum of 10/1 (page in/page out). The more page outs you have, the more like a RAM upgrade will benefit you.
I found this site:
Other World Computing RAM upgrade for MacBook 6,1
http://eshop.macsales.com/shop/memory/Apple_MacBook_MacBook_Pro/Upgrade/DDR3_White
It seems it's possible to upgrade.
Best Answer
You might know already the discussion here: https://discussions.apple.com/message/8053632#8053632
If you are actually limited by RAM, then I would not assume that the performance impact of a mixed 1GB/2GB setup would change much. Swapping to disk is so slow, it's hardly compensated by RAM timing issues.
However, first make sure that RAM is actually your issue.