If you are the latter, you know who you are. If you are a professional, who pushes your personal computer to the limit, it might be nice to have more RAM. The thing is that 8 GB of RAM is plenty for just about anything that an ordinary user would do. Many users will see this behavior, and jump to the conclusion that the Mac OS 'requires a lot of RAM', or that their computer has a 'memory leak' somewhere, or that they need more RAM because they are 'running out.' None of these are true. The Mac OS might go so far as to make use of every last bit of free RAM that you have. It is so advanced that the Mac OS will notice that unused RAM is just sitting around doing nothing, and the OS will cache random things in RAM on the chance that you might need them again soon, so caching them will cause your Mac to run faster. Macs have had very advanced memory management for many years now, including memory compression. I tend to advise folks NOT to use Activity Monitor to keep track of their RAM usage, because folks don't understand the data that Activity Monitor shows them. Good luck with your upgrade regardless of route you take and maybe do a bit more of the Google searching on such an upgrade for various users results. And theoretically, any decent solid state drive should be even much faster than any spinner drive. I do not usually do any video or media or photo editing or retouching.Īt least your 2015 iMac has USB 3.0 Port connections which have some speedy advantages along with much cheaper costs for attached drives. I'm sure that a faster drive would certainly have a faster speed, at least for file transfers and backups.īy the way, I do not notice any major slow down when I have used either backup drive as a boot Drive using the same connections. The point of my comment is that I discovered the speed of the Thunderbolt Buffalo Drive was barely or even the same speed as the WD Black HDD, but I am assuming that was due to the speed capabilities of the drive itself, rather than the theoretical speed of the Thunderbolt 1 connection which is theoretically an amazing 10 Gbps!!!

I also use a Western Digital Black 3.5 in 7200 RPM spinner HDD for the same usage but connected via one of my Firewire 800 ports. I know my 2011 iMac uses older and slower versions of the Thunderbolt connections, but I had similar thoughts years ago when I purchased a 2.5 in Buffalo spinner HDD that I use for Carbon Copy Cloner (CCC) backup as well as occasionally using it as a boot drive.

2015 imac hard drive replacement