eli5 Why do pcs need ram, when you can just use your ssd as one

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It’s a common knowledge that computers run on rams, any application run on a pc is temporarily stored in the ram. So why can’t we just dedicate 32Gbs of ssd storage to ram and have our pcs run on it? That way one could have a 256Gbs of ram easily, without the need of the ram sticks and for so much cheaper.

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Anonymous 0 Comments

SSDs are stupid fast compared to hard drives but slow compared to RAM

RAM has access times around 10 nanoseconds. SSD access times are 25,000-100,000 nanoseconds

For scale, that’s the difference in time between something on the table in front of you and having to get it delivered next day.

Think about cooking dinner and how it would kill your cooking speed if you could only have 4 ingredients out and everything else was 24 hours away. The long access time would result in huge down times for the CPU and crush performance. We have 3 layers of cache, and then RAM to try to hold data in use as close to the CPU as possible to minimize access times and therefore time the CPU is waiting

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