Next Upgrade!

[shabaz]

Hey, guys!

 

     I have been trying to get more into my technology, and now I am looking to upgrade something. I am currently running an HP - 15-ab277cl laptop. I have an i7 - 5500U 3GHz with integrated graphics, 12 GB DDR3 - SODIMM 1600, and 5400 RPM 1TB HDD. I have been thinking about maxing out my board at 16gb of RAM or upgrading my HDD to a much smaller SSD and replacing my optical drive with a hard drive caddy. I am about to graduate college and will be going out on wildfires across the nation creating maps to be used on the fires so I won't be able to upgrade to a PC for transportation and power purposes. I generally run about 20 Chrome tabs at once while having ArcMap 10.4.1, QGIS, and Google Earth Pro running. I notice I run around 7gb of ram at once, and my CPU seems to be able to keep up in all but the most extravagant tools in Arc. I have usually observed my HDD run at 100 especially when opening large map datasets. I don't generally game but I would like to run lighter titles like G-Mod, Kerbal Space Program, the Bioshock Series, and SWTOR

 

     My question is, has anyone ever upgraded their optical drive like this? What caddy did you use and are you happy you did it? Does anyone know the SATA that the optical drive uses 1, 2, or 3? Even if I upgrade my HDD how will that help me after I have loaded into the program? I require large capacity drives due to working on data sets that regularly exceed 40 GB maps. Would my best bet be to load all of my programs and map data onto the SSD while working on them and then transfer that data to my HDD akin to a cold storage drive?  How much would upgrading my RAM benefit me if at all? If the answer is none, why do many people run 16GB+ on their machines? Does anyone have any more recommendations for me? I appreciate any advice I can get.

 

Sincerely, 

     Shabaz

Edited April 2, 2017 by shabaz

[Pendragon]

11 minutes ago, shabaz said:

Even if I upgrade my HDD how will that help me after I have loaded into the program? I require large capacity drives due to working on data sets that regularly exceed 40 GB maps. Would my best bet be to load all of my programs and map data onto the SSD while working on the  How much would upgrading my RAM benefit me if at all? If the answer is none, why do many people run 16GB+ on their machines? Does anyone have any more recommendations for me? I appreciate any advice I can get.

 

If your data set is stored on the HDD, the SSD will boot the program quickly, but running and using the data set will still be at HDD speeds because it's on the HDD.

If you can afford a large SSD, putting all the data on the SSD will be magnitudes faster but also more expensive.

RAM is only needed if you need alot of it. People run 16+ gb on machines (like my own) if they have a need for it. Running dozens of chrome tabs + a few industry financial software + huge excel sheets + anything on the side eats up ram pretty quickly. Video editors also use alot of ram. If you need it, then you just add more. If you don't, it won't help you at all.

 

You have enough RAM right  now. You should just upgrade to an SSD boot drive. Your HDD is pretty slow too at 5200rpm but nothing can be done. If everything your running is fine as is, then there's no reason to upgrade. 

[shabaz]

That's about what I thought. I regularly work in large excel sheets of 100,000+ rows. I have noticed some speed problems but I think that again comes back to my HDD and not the RAM. Would it be worth it to move up to a 7200 RPM drive since those aren't exorbitantly expensive?