Essentially, RAM comes in small sizes (8, 16, 32 GB) but storage is in TB? Why is
this? Would more RAM be better?
In: 0
RAM is a lot more expensive, and is a lot more volatile – you lose all data in RAM when you turn off your machine. Disk can store things for longer for cheaper, using less space and power.
Ram is like the open space on a desk. Storage is like a closet full of things you can use. Anytime you want to do something you have to take a program out of the closet and open it on the desk. Anytime you shut the machine off your desk gets wiped clean. So it’s just the nature of the beast to have a lot more things stored but not being used at the moment in the closet, versus things you are using at the moment open on the desk. Theoretically you could open everything if you had enough desk space but its expensive, wasteful of resources and unnecessary. It’s just easier to keep a couple things open that you’re working on and shut the things off that you weren’t saving desk space.
You only need to work on one or a few projects at a time. The disk is like a library of books that you may need at some point but not all the time. When you open a program, its code and some data get loaded into RAM temporarily, and then unloaded as you finish working with it.
As the average amount of memory in computers grows, software developers start to make use of it less efficiently. They introduce abstraction layers and virtualization, which automatically load stuff into memory and keep it there without the programmer explicitly managing what is currently needed. So you inevitably have to add more RAM to use new software. But you’ll never have as much memory as the disk space on a personal computer.
More RAM doesn’t always mean better performance. Most people aren’t doing RAM-intensive things like video editing or gaming. If you’re only doing things like web browsing and email then you don’t need more than 4GB of RAM. Anything more than what you need is going to sit there unused and contributing nothing to your computer’s performance.
RAM is basically your computers short term memory and the storage is its long term memory.
RAM is much faster than even the fastest storage, but if you turn your computer off the contents of the RAM are gone.
For a computer to actively work with some data it first has to copy it into RAM.
Working with data in RAM is fast. Needing to read data from storage takes ages by comparison. This is why you want all the programs and data you might need in the RAM ready to go.
Sometimes the RAM is to small and the computer has switch out parts of the contents of the RAM to the storage to make room. This switching back and forth is one of the primary reasons for a computer being slow.
Having more RAM fixes much of the issues with computers being slowed down by constantly having to wait for a slow drive.
Sometimes computer can end up with RAM in sizes similar to the size of their hard drives and other connected storage, but this can get expensive really fast.
*Fun Fact:*
Windows 11 Pro for Workstations can handle up to 6TB of RAM.
RAM modules are made from complicated circuitry that is difficult to make and miniaturize, while Hard Disks are traditionally spinning platters covered in oxide rust that are much easier to manufacture by comparison.
So getting more and more data on a spinning disk is a lot easier to accomplish from an engineering perspective that making RAM chips more dense. This is why hard drives are so large compared to RAM.
RAM though is much much faster than a hard disk, but it has the downside that it’s volatile. If you cut the power all the contents are lost so it isn’t suitable for long term storage.
Think of your RAM as your short term memory, fast and ready to go, while a hard drive is long term memory, big capacity but a lot slower.
SSDs are in the middle, they are made of circuitry and therefore a lot faster than Spinning Hard drives but slower than RAM.
But they still hold data when the power is cut off, which makes them great and high speed long term storage. But like RAM they are difficult to make, but the circuitry overall is simpler. Which is why SSDs are so much smaller in capacity than spinning hard drives. But they are catching up!
The transistors used in RAM are more expensive because they need to work a lot faster than the ones used in storage. That’s why we typically have a lot less RAM than we do storage.
Also, for the vast majority of people right now, there just really isn’t any *need* for more than a few dozen GB of RAM. I’m sure that’ll change in 5, 10, 20 years… but right now, a few dozen GB is all anybody needs.
More RAM is almost always better, but is often unaffordable
Fast memory and dense memory are rarely the same design
RAM is super fast but part of what makes it fast is having a transistor and a capacitor for each bit plus some extra supporting circuitry that doesn’t squish well. The end result of this is that a single chip just can’t hold that many bytes of data so you need more area and therefore more $$$. Currently cheap DDR4 RAM comes in around $2/GB so you could do bigger and bigger setups with 64 or 128 GB of memory, it’ll just cost you $200-400 to pull off. It doesn’t make sense to offer 2000 GB of RAM when it’ll cost you $4k+
Other storage is designed explicitly to be cheap even if its not the fastest. Spinning magnetic platters can fit a lot of data on them and don’t require any super fancy processes to make. They’re slow, but you can get them for $0.02/GB so it makes sense to offer 2000 GB for $40
SSDs are a lot faster and require fancier processes, but while RAM was using basically 2 transistors per bit, a modern cheap SSD uses 0.25 transistors per bit of storage as they keep 4 values in each transistor and they don’t have the expensive supporting equipment so for the same area of silicon you can fit about 10x as much data. You can see this in the price too with SSDs being around $0.10-0.20/GB. When 2000 GB is still just $200 it makes sense to sell.
Ram can’t store things when it’s turned off. Your computer needs at least as much disk storage as ram so you can save your data when you turn off the computer.
Thank you to all, these answers were very informative
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