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
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.
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