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
This is because there’s no technology that would provide speed, capacity and permanent storage. You can choose at best only two of this characteristics. If we would only use RAM, then that’d be very inconvenient, as you’d have to provide power to it to avoid loosing data, and such storage would be very costly per gigabyte. But very fast, yeah. If you’d use SSD instead of RAM, then data reading would take quite a long delays and your programs would perform much worse. There’s also multiple cache memory levels inside CPU – they’re much faster than RAM, but they’re even more limiting in size and cost.
But by combining HDD, SSD, RAM and cache you can achieve best of them all – HDD for long term large storage, for things that you don’t access very often, SSD for system files or things that you read frequently, RAM for applications data that they use in process, and cache for data that processor is processing right now. This way, programs or users could decide where to store what data depending on how important to access it fast and how much data there’s to store.
If at one day there would appear technology that could access large quantities of data with miniscule delay and is cheap – that technology could as well replace both RAM and storage. But that won’t happen any time soon.
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