Can i write to, or call from, data in the harddrive, by inputing a memory address as i would with ram?

Question

this is in C++. I don't know for sure how ram and normal harddrive memory works. Point is, i need to put into some sort of memory, a table/matrix, that has 17770 rows, and 480thousand coloumns, where in each box, there is a 3 bit number (0-5). I figured i would need approximately 3.2 gigabytes of space for this matrix. Problem is that i don't have so much ram. At first i though i could make two folders with text files in each folder, where in one folder i would have 17770 text files each with info about the 480thousand variables...and then, in the other folder, have 480thousand files, with 17k info in each. Unfortunely, just the creation of these files would take 10 days. And, even if i create these files, i think loading a file would take too long since windows would have to scan the name of each file until one matches with the query.
Can anyone help?

Answer 1

Database design theory is a 3 hour semester course in and of itself. There are ways to make your search more efficient using binary trees. The link in my source shows some details as well as showing more references. The type of database you're talking about though is definitely one for disk storage. It is not intended to be stored on the computer itself.

Answer 2

You shouldn't need to explicitly write to the hard disk. Assuming you're using an operating system which uses virtual memory (basically any OS in the past 15+ years), then you can just ignore how much RAM you actually have and pretend you do have 3.2 GB of RAM or whatever. Of course, if the amount of RAM you have plus the amount of free disk space you have isn't much bigger than 3.2 GB, then you might have problems and might need to free up some hard drive space.