How much ram should i put in my mac mini mid-2011?

4GB would only be a modest improvement in Mavericks. It is always best to future proof and go for the larger upgrade, instead of wishing that you had.

Additionally if you are going to run GarageBand, iMovie projects or move on to Pro App's at sometime, you might some day wish that you had taken it to 16GB.

see > Apple Mac mini Memor upgrades for 2011 Mac mini models

You are welcome.

If you don't have an SSD already, I would get one of those first and swap it with your current internal hard drive. You will get the performance benefits of an SSD, plus if your computer runs out of physical memory (RAM) then it will use the SSD for virtual memory and that will be so much faster than using a hard drive that it will feel like you upgraded the RAM already.

Tough question.

2 GB RAM is very small. Even on memory-efficient Mavericks you are swapping very much memory onto HD. 8 GB RAM gives you much more actual processing. Think of a 1x1 ft desk vs a 10x4 ft desk.

SSD makes it faster as well (faster storage access).

Both is best, but 2 GB RAM even with SSD is going to disappoint I believe.

External drives come cheaper ... around $100 for 1 TB. Not the fastest external storage for movies and music, but not too many $$.

The other option is a Hybrid drive.

I have a 7200 rpm Hitachi Travalstar and 8GB in my Mac Mini, and it runs circles around the stock configuration. Additionally they come in 500GB and a 1T for around $100, so that you will not have to spend an arm and leg on a drive that is to small for editing large projects.

If you have Apple Care, you should wait until your coverage period is up because it will void the remaining warranty.

Otherwise, see > Mac Mini Mid 2011 Repair - iFixit, they even suggest a 1T Seagate Hybrid on there site.

You can get a 120GB Samsung SSD on Amazon for $90. Put your movies and music on an external drive since it doesn't matter how fast you read/write those. You can take your current internal drive and put it in an external enclosure for $15.

For the money, this will give you the biggest performance improvement.

But, if you still want to upgrade your RAM, you can go to the Activity Monitor app, Memory tab, and look at "Swap used" in the lower left corner. That will tell you how much data *would* be stored in memory if you upgraded. Check this number next time your computer is running slow. If it's 2GB or less, then you wouldn't benefit at all from > 4GB total memory. Currently I "only" have 4GB of memory in my Mac Mini and I'm running a bunch of stuff and I'm using zero swap, so I would get literally no benefit from more RAM.

Make sure you are running all the apps you normally run. I just looked at my 2102 with 16 GB and I have 1.2 GB fo Swap. I am running Windows 7 via Parallels

What OS X are you running? My Mac Mini easily consumes 4 to 5GB just running Mavericks and a few basic OS X App's. In addition, the RAM usage will easily go up to 7+ GB running in OS X editing App's like iMovie and GarageBand.

On my 2009 with Mavericks I only have Chrome open with many tabs and Seti@home running and I am using 5.9GB (8 GB installed)