I am proposing to upgrade the 4GB RAM in my Mac Mini 2.5 GHz core i5, by replacing it with 2 x 8GB Crucial 'slots'. Will the performance be significantly better than if I upgrade with 2 x 4GB slots? Is it cost effective, is the question.

Question

My Mac Mini (2.5GHz Core i5) came with 4GB RAM, and I now wish to upgrade the RAM to either 8GB or 16GB in total (Crucial). Clearly, there is a price difference separating the two, but would this be justified by the extent of the improvement in performance, if I went for the more expensive option of 16GB RAM?
Secondly, if I am allowed to pose two questions: what seems to be the most compliant, reliable and cost effective external hard drive for this or Mac Mini's more generally? I was thinking of purchasing a 3TB HD for storing my rather large collection of photographs and Logic Pro 9 musical endeavours.
Your experience and advice would be appreciated, my having only recently made the switch from a Windows system to Mac.

Answer 1

I 150% agree with dwb and woodmeister50 about WD hard drives. They are NOWHERE near the quality they should be. When you can get a Seagate for just a few dollars more, and they last years longer, NO ONE should buy a WD. I lost $25,000 worth of music and audiobooks on a six-week-old WD in 2007 and that was the last I'd ever buy from them. They REFUSED to warranty it with the ORIGINAL sales receipt from Bestbuy.
I have 16Gb of Crucial RAM in my Mini and here's what I've discovered.
You WON'T see "lightning fast" performance increases, becasue the Mini is pretty darned fast to begin with. What you WILL see is that when you're running RAM intensive apps like Photoshop or Parallels, other apps won't "bog down".
Quite frequently I find myself with less than half a gig of free RAM out of that 16. When it was only 8 I was at 100% nearly ALL THE TIME. When I only had the 4 it came with, it was always maxed out.