Can I use a hard drive as ram?

Question

I was wondering if there is another way to boost ny nachine by having an extra hard drive used as ram, to spped thing out. I understand RAM is only a temporary file, like the hard drive is permanent untill deleted.

Answer 1

Well yes and no, You can specify an amount of your hard drive to be used for virtual memory which is basically ram. Windows will decide the amount automatically but you can change theses settings.

If you want to do this.

1. Right click on the "My Computer" icon and click on "Properties"
2. Click on the "Advanced" Tab
3. Then under "Performance" click the "Settings" button
4. In the "Settings" Box that opens click on "Advanced" again.
5. The bottom option lets you specify the amount of virtual ram you want.

Answer 2

Yes. your hard drive has something called a swap partition on it, which is basically used as RAM. The reason this cannot take the place of RAM however, is because access speeds are much slower. It is often used in the same way as RAM though. In windows you can increase this amount of your hard drive by increasing the "virtual memory" windows uses. This can be done from the control panel. if you search windows help for virtual memory, it walks you through the process.

Answer 3

... wow... of course not! RAM is not a temporary file, it is Random Access Memory. Look into your computer, next to your Proccessor is maybe 1 or 2 sticks. About 5 inches long. Thats RAM. The only way to add more RAM, is to figure out what kind of RAM you are using, what pin your motherboard supports and get more RAM not a hard drive, a harddrive stores your things, RAM runs it

Answer 4

No, RAM is another hardware inside the PC. the RAM if you want to speed up you can buy a bigger size. like a 1Gb RAM. for the hard disk is the volume storage space for your data. so it cannot be the additional add-ons.the one that is mentioned the temporary internet files is the offline files that you surf on the internet and the online sites. they have stored cookies and offline files and files in the temporary folder is to assist the re-visiting of those sites faster. because when you visit the sites at first time it will be loading the data in the temporary folder. so the next time when you visit it will be faster. its a 3 different things that you will need to take note.

Answer 5

no as such.
But what you can do is increase your page file setting.
THe optimum is to take your amount of ram and multiply it by one and a half. example: 128 will be 192,256 Ram will be 384, 512 wil be 768

What you would do is:
Right click my computer
Go to properties
Click advanced
On performance click settings
Click advanced
At the bottom you will see virtual memory
click change
Pick a drive (if you have more than one)
Select custom
type in the new value

PS: Ram is a Physical module attached to your motherboard. Not a file.

Answer 6

You can set the page file exclusively to that drive (a bit of a boost). This has already been explained.

Also, Vista will be supporting a virtual RAM feature similar to a swapfile, instead using the drive exclusively as a RAM addon.

Answer 7

Yes, if you are running windows then it already is. It is called a swap file/pagefile and is many times slowwwwer than RAM....
Hard drive space will speed things up only to a point - as it is being used as a buffer.

In DOS we would use RAM as a HD. That made a virtual HD with almost instant access (relative to 1988 speeds)

Answer 8

You are already using it as a RAM. The windows Operating system uses Paging system or virtual memory. Once the physical RAM memory is full, the operating system automatically starts writing excess pages to hard drive. But remember, hard drive is almost 20 times slower than RAM memory. What if Operating system doesn't support virtual memory? Either your computer will crash or Operating system won't allow you to open anymore programs.

Answer 9

The paging file is an amount of hard drive space that is used as RAM. You can boost this to increase performance. Right click on my computer, go to properties, than advanced. Click performance settings, than advanced, it's the last option. I'm not sure how much you can use, but I have it set for 1.5 gb min to 6.0 gb max.

Answer 10

yes, you can allocate up to 4 GB of HD space as your virtual memory. Windows XP utilizes this space by default, but not as much as 4 GB (I think only 768 MB).

Rule of thumb: maximum amount you can allocate is 1.5 x of your total amount of physical RAM.

It does help you a bit. For true performance increase, adding more physical RAM is one of several options.

Hope it helps...