Hard drive vs RAM for christmas?

[Whiternoise]

or both!

I want to get a new hard drive since 250GB is getting a little thin on the ground for all my (RAW) photos, apps, music, films and the Boot Camp partition. Then it dawned on me that all my hard drives (including desktop) combined at the moment are less than a TB - good times!

The Scorpio Blue 1TB looks very tempting and reports say that my unibody can cope with the 12.5mm height. The only problem is price. Especially when Toshiba are selling an external, 2.5" TB for £80 on Amazon (a good £30 less than the WD). Someone on Amazon said they just popped the case open and swapped the drives, so I think that sounds like a plan.

If I bought and OEM, I'm guessing I'd also need a caddy so I can do a backup and reinstall OS X with minimal fuss when I swap the drives.

Scan offer a few too, mostly around the £75 mark - with a couple of TB and 750GB options. Does anyone have any particular recommendations?

The other option is some more RAM - I've eyed up the 8GB SODIMMs on Scan, but apparently my macbook can only take up to 6GB. A 4GB stick costs £53 on Scan, so can I get that and swap out a single stick or will it degrade performance? I might just buy the 8GB and keep it for when I next get a laptop (probably another macbook, to be honest) in a couple of years, but it seems silly to spend that sort of money when I can buy one stick now and another later. I realise I could just buy the 4GB and use it on its own, but will I get 5GB if I use it with a stick of stock RAM?

What do I do?!

(My point is that the WD Scorpio costs about the same - plusminus a tenner - as a 1TB Toshiba and a 4GB corsair stick).

[Terbinator]

If you've lasted this long on 250GB , 1TB is going to be like a whole new world so the 1TB & 4GB seems the likely suitable option but... Are you sure you need the extra 4GB of RAM anyway (obviously i don't know your uses/programs) ?

[Whiternoise]

I use VMWare quite a lot (though I'm looking towards Wine more and more), and I normally have a fair few programs open, so I figure a RAM boost will do me some good. Just seems handy to have a bit more headroom available

[Terbinator]

In that case i would go for the RAM as well

I can't see the next few revisions of 'Macs ditching DDR3 anytime soon either

[Lustral]

Upgrade from 2GB to 4Gb of RAM is immense , i would recommend getting the RAM from crucial online

about £67 for 4GB SO-DIMM DDR3 is not bad for the price.

Also i recently upgraded my 250GB drive in my Macbook to a 500GB Seagate Momentus XT and now it flys.

[Ulti]

I know you're looking at 4GB sticks but 2GB Kingston sticks are only £14.99 at Play.

http://www.play.com/PC/PCs/-/3319/25...prd:hotukdeals