Switched Tells You How to Take RAM by the Horns

by Terrence O'Brien on January 22, 2010 at 12:50 PM

Part of being a good user and consumer is understanding how technology works, why we use it the way we do, and what the barrage of acronyms and PR jargon means. We're here to help you make sense of it all and give you a better appreciation for how that pile of transistors, pixels, and antennas works together to deliver the conveniences of the modern world to your living room or office.

What Is RAM?

We're sure that you all know RAM stands for Random Access Memory, and that more of it is good. But do you really know what it is, how it works, and why exactly having more of it makes your computer seem to work faster?

The simplest way to describe RAM is as temporary storage. Any data your computer is currently crunching is loaded into RAM to be processed and read. This includes your operating system, programs being run, and files being accessed. You may be wondering, why, if all of this information is stored on your hard drive, does the computer need to load it into RAM? The issue is speed. Imagine you have a small file cabinet in your office and another, much larger file archive in a storage room. RAM is that small file cabinet, keeping important and immediately needed information on hand. If you had to go down to the storage room every time you needed to read something, you would do your job very slowly. Well, the same is the case with a computer.

So Why Is More Better?

Having more memory makes your PC faster, or, at least, seem faster. With more RAM, a computer can work on more information concurrently, giving a particular boost to multi-tasking performance. This is because if the RAM becomes full, your computer will transfer the oldest (but still active) data to a swap file (sometimes called virtual memory), which is temporarily stored on the hard drive. Reading and writing to this file will predictably make switching between tasks slower. Increasing your RAM will allow you to "swap" data between the hard drive and memory less often.

What Makes It Random?

"Random access" refers to the way in which data is retrieved. Information can be read directly from RAM, regardless of where it is physically located, and this is part of what makes RAM faster than other storage media. DVDs and hard disks, for instance, must physically seek out the location of data before reading it.

So Why Not Use RAM to Store Files Instead of Hard Disks?

There are disadvantages to RAM as a storage medium. For one, it is far more expensive than more archival formats like hard drives. While a 1-terabyte hard disk can be purchased for as little as $100, an equal amount of modern DDR2 (second generation double data rate) RAM would cost in excess of $25,000. Secondly (as if you needed a "secondly"), RAM is a "volatile" storage solution, meaning that when power is cut to it, all stored information is lost. Other media, like CDs, flash drives, and hard disks, continue to store information regardless, but RAM requires electricity to function.

Now armed with this knowledge, we hope you have a better understanding of what exactly RAM is, it's function, and why more is better, but only if you can actually make use of it all.

10 Ways to Speed Up Your Computer Now

Tags: features, inanutshell, ram, random access memory, RandomAccessMemory, top

Comments

jbjg24mJan 25th 2010 6:59AM

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just had this done to my pc. it runs faster and quiter now !

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DavidJan 25th 2010 7:18AM

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"DVDs and hard disks, for instance, must physically seek out the location of data before reading it." No they do not. After files are stored to these mediums a File Allocation Table or Table of Contents is generated, telling the computer where everything is at. This is what your computer reads when you use the exporer to look at files. Sure it takes a second to get the read arm in position.

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billybobbloobicJan 25th 2010 7:48AM

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David, The initial seek and storage to FAT ot TOC must be done once making the author correct regardless. Nice arguement though.

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ceking19182Jan 25th 2010 8:10AM

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Greetings:

Just for those who may still be unclear of what RAM means, even after the above description, here is how I managed to learn about RAM. This is how I from thereafter explained it:-

1). Consider you are at your desk. You want to look at some files, and so you pull open your filing cabinate and take out 6 folders, and take th contents out of those folders. They fit neatly on your desk. You can see all the contents from all those files on your desk.

2). Now consider the instance when you wish to take out more flders and place their contents on your desk. Well, you find out now taht you do not have enough space on your desk.

3). The next thing you can do is buy a larger desk that will be large enough for you to take all the contents out of those second batch of folders and place them on your desk so taht you will be able to view all of your files contents.

This therefore is how I view RAM. It permits me to have more documents opened at one time and find them easily when I want a particular document. It saves me the task of getting up from the desk and walking over to the file cabinate and brining over the folders one by one. At the end of the day, I would not leave all those documents on top of my desk, so I would place them back into my file cabinate (hard drive) and my desk top will be cleared of all docuements.

Regards

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ROBERT RAYJan 25th 2010 12:26PM

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how much $ to get a decent amount? and how much would be good for anormal household?

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al schraderJan 25th 2010 12:49PM

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Nice article but they still didn't make it clear. RAM or random access memory is the part of your computer memory that has electric current (5 volts) flowing through it. And it's the part that gets wiped-out if the power flickers.
When I first got into this all we had was simple AND,OR,NAND, NOR etc seniconductors. That was the 1970's. Then I went to work building anti-tank rockets. Someone figured out a way to interface a clock drive & ram with your tv and the Commodore 64 was born: The first actual computer. It had 64 K of memory. Everybody realized that to do anything the "box" would need more memory and the race was on. There were and still are behind the scenes geniuses involved, especially at Intel the chip maker. And this is still only just the beginning. Learning computers, AI, robots that do everything, etc. are still on the way. Right now I'm working on new micro-scopic robots that will switch-out the DNA in cells extending human life to 150 years or more. All the nay-sayers, 2012 people etc, I'm not in that group, sorry....Alfred-

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CooperJan 27th 2010 2:21PM

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I'm wondering, given the analogy, at what point does RAM cease to be usable. I believe there actually IS a limit to the amount of RAM that Windows, at least, can even use. Taking the analogy of a larger filing cabinet in my office, at some point I basically end up with a remote archive which is just as cumbersome as the vault down in the basement - except that it's physically closer to the point of use. Or, to take the desktop analogy a step further, I can only "see" so many documents at a time, so at what point is it pointless to be able to put more stuff on my desktop (or in RAM)?

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terrenceJan 27th 2010 7:07PM

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@Cooper, excellent question -- in 32-bit versions of Windows the maximum amount of RAM that can be addressed is 4GB, however in reality that is often much lower thanks to basic components of processors and operating systems being designed long before we had broken the 10MB mark when measuring RAM. If you're interested you can read all about it here -- http://www.dansdata.com/askdan00015.htm

64-bit versions of Windows correct this error, and are able to access more memory just by nature of being 64-bit. Things get messy here though. Theoretically a 64-bit system can address 16 Exabytes of RAM, that 16.3 million Terabytes. However Microsoft places artificial limits on how much memory its OS can access, they are as follows:
* Starter: 8GB
* Home Basic: 8GB
* Home Premium: 16GB
* Professional: 192GB
* Ultimate: 192GB
When it comes to Linux and OS X things are a little less concrete -- You can buy a Mac Pro with 32 GB of RAM and an Xserve with 48, but what the limitations of the OS are isn't clear. Linux is also a bit of a mystery, the most recent figure I could find was from 2005 when 64 Unix and Linux were capable of addressing 1TB or physical RAM.

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