What is the difference between a 64 GB solid state hard drive and 64 GB of ram and can you allot 16 GB of a solid state hard drive to swap space and effectively have 16 GB of ram?

Answer 1

There are 64GB hard drives, in fact, that is a fairly average size hard drive. There is no such thing as 64GB RAM. The largest RAM available is 4 GB and that is the most any computer at this time can hold. You can use some of your hard drive as memory, that is called Virtual Memory and the motherboad does it automatically but you can change it in the software of Windows. I would suggest you review the documentation on the internet on the motherboard or the system that you have, it will give you the correct amount of Virtual Memory to use. 64GB is not realistic and your system will be unstable.

:::This is the asker- you are missing my point: I am talking theoretically about what would the difference be between a SOLID STATE (not spinning) hard drive and flash memory of the same size- and since swap space (Virtual Memory) is simply hard disk space allotted to write unused RAM memory items temporalily, if you have a solid state hard drive with superfast read/write (like RAM, since it's basically the same thing), whether you could have virtually unlimited RAM just by increasing your swap space when you have a solid state hard drive? I was not asking about my computer at all... Also I think you can have more than 4 gb of ram, if you install it yourself There are many MAJOR differences between solid state drives and RAM. The main differences are: 1. Solid State drives are non-volatile so when you turn the computer off whatever is stored on it is still there. RAM requires power to retain information stored on it. 2. The attainable speed on the two are different due to architecture and as of now RAM is significantly faster. As far as having 64 GB of ram, the barrier at the moment is 16 GB max on a 64 bit processor (for desktop computers, mainframes and servers are different due to architecture). If you did have 64 GB of RAM, you would be able to make faster speed exchanges than 64 GB of virtual memory due to bus speeds and relative distance from the CPU. If you actually needed to utilize 64 GB of the fastest memory possible then you would want RAM. Honestly though if you need that much then you are probably doing extreme theoretical work and should look into distributed computing or mainframes because Im sure there is are multiple barriers for the CPU...