can i use hard disk drive in place of random access memory(RAM)?

Question

can i use hard disk drive in place of random access memory(RAM)?

Answer 1

Most computer companies partition the hard drive into C and D partitions. In the D partition they install what are called CAB files. These are the windows files that are needed to do a system restore or reinstall of the operating system. They put these in a separate partition so that if the C partition with the installed operating system gets corrupted or infected it can be wiped and reinstalled. This keeps the CAB files safer. If this is the case I would strongly urge you not to use the D partition for file storage. An external USB HDD or adding an internal HDD would be a better option.

Answer 2

Short answer is no.

May be in few years, Microsoft and Fujitsu are working on a flash hard drive. The hard drive is extrimly slow and the paths to access memory and HDD are different. Memory have a special fast connection to CPU and hard drives don't.



Virtual ram (paging file) is not RAM it's just a stop gap arrangement to overcome less RAM. When you want to actually use any of data from virtual ram it have to be loaded in RAM. This make the computer think of having more RAM.



You can always use the other way around though. Virtual floppy drivers and special PCI card with RAM can be used as hard drive.

Answer 3

No,Because RAM means Random Access Memory,Any system booted from Hard-disk to RAM. without RAM any system can't work.

Answer 4

No you can't.

In fact Windows/Linux manage a swap files as a virtual memory, it means Windows/Linux create a special spaces (usually the size is 1.5 bigger than your RAM) to put some applications which was loaded as an index or a fetch to be loaded after when you need those applications again.



In the PC, hard disk is the biggest bottleneck in data transfer. Its speed and bandwidth on transferring data aren't as fast and wide as RAM. Even if someday you'll be able to manage the harddisk as a RAM, your PC will work very slow.



You can't replace RAM with HDD physically, that's why some hardware need a DMA (Direct Memory Access) to execute it's instructions more faster.

Answer 5

Yes. And most modern operating systems have this built in. It's called "virtual memory" or "paging."

Answer 6

Short answer is no. Longer answer is that disk drive space is used for a swap or page file. This swaps data out of memory to the hard drive so other data can be loaded into memory. The CPU is not doing calculations with the Hard Drive though, it is too slow. It is working with RAM only.



-Dio

Answer 7

Yes, they use to have a program called V (Virtual) RAM. Of course things in RAM run faster, the downside is when you restart your computer it's all lost. However for the price of the program and a couple more dollars it would be cheaper to just get more RAM. You could put things like your internet browser cache in the VRAM directory. Chow

Answer 8

Windows already does this for you automatically. The only problem is the hard drive virtual memory is much slower.