Why can’t you exchange some of your normal storage on a computer for more RAM?
In: Technology
You can, and already do. It’s called [paging](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paging). Your operating system will use disk space like extra RAM if it needs to, and will move less-frequently-accessed data from RAM onto the disk in some situations. You can configure the size of your page file to get ‘extra RAM’ — and in the 90s there was scam software like SoftRAM that claimed to double your RAM by changing this setting.
The problem is that disk storage is a *lot* slower. Anywhere from 1/10th to 1/150th of the speed depending on your disk and RAM type. So performance is much worse.
You can. This is called swapping. The disadvantage is that this additional memory will not be as fast as RAM but rather as slow as your hard drives. You may notice this as your applications will not immediately fail when you are out of memory but rather they will just slow down.
You used to be able to. It was called Ram Disk. It used dedicated drive space as part of memory.
It was very slow, but if you were desperate it would work.
With RAM as cheap as it is I don’t know why anyone would want that now.
You can, and most operating systems have been doing this automatically for decades. A portion of your hard disk (generally in the form of a swap file) will be used to extend the amount of RAM your computer has in the form of “virtual memory.” However, data access is a lot slower from the hard disk, so you will notice a fairly dramatic slow down if your computer is having to use this extended memory space frequently. These days, RAM is so relatively plentiful that we don’t usually need to use this method, but RAM amounts used to be one of the most common causes and fixes of slow computer complaints.
Or if you were asking about why you can’t physically replace hard disk storage with more RAM inside your computer case, it’s because they use different interfaces that are specialized for different uses, with the RAM slots being much more expensive in terms of money, motherboard space, and CPU processing requirements than hard drive ports.
It’s like not being able to plug a USB into an electrical outlet. “But wait,” you might say, “there are adapters to do exactly that!” And actually, there are for RAM sticks and disk interfaces too. They’re called DRAM SSDs, and they act as super fast (and super expensive!) hard drives in your computer. Combined with the virtual memory method above, they can even serve as fairly adequate extended memory. But they still can’t perform as well as normally-installed RAM because they’re limited by the performance constraints of the hard disk interface (and somewhat by their physical distance from the CPU as well).
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