Is there a relationship between the capacity of a Hard Drive and RAM.?

Answer 1

they are both completely seperate entitys.

Ram is so called "short-term" memory which remembers what you are doing at this instant games etc and things like what you have copy, which is save to clipboard.

Harddrive is "long-term" memory which naturally has greater capacity

Answer 2

The short answer is no. You can have gigabytes of RAM with megabytes of hard drive or vice versa.

However, you may be looking at a number that is not quite RAM. Hard drives do have a cache, generally 2, 4, 8, or 16 megabytes which is basically RAM for the hard drive to use to speed access. In this case, if you are comparing hard drives, bigger drives will tend to have a bigger cache and between two hard drives of the same size, a bigger cache is better.

Answer 3

The general answer to this question is No

RAM stands for Random Access Memory and is used by your computer as the work area. The storage provided by your hard drive is classed as secondary storage - its where the programs and data are stored when you are not running them on the computer.

The specific and much more technical answer is that modern hard drives generally have RAM of their own which is used as a cache store. The idea is that files are generally bigger than one sector so when the main computer asks for a sector (of data or program) from the hard drive, the hard drives cpu doesn't just read the required sector but also a few more relating to the file, in preperation for the next request from the computer and stores them in its own cache (RAM) memory. A subsequent request from the computer to the hard disk for the next sector of a large file, results in the disk drive CPU supplying the allready read sector from memory rather than having to access the disk. This cacheing system increases the speed of overall disk access for large files. The amount of cache is normally a fraction of a percent of the actual disk size - usually between 2 and 16 Mb.

Answer 4

No, there is no direct relation. Hard drives are used for the long-term storage of data, whereas RAM (Random Access Memory) is used for only short-term data processing. Think of it this way: Let's say you are going on a trip that will last 3 days. You may have 50 pairs of socks stored in your sock drawer of your dresser (your "hard drive"). However, you know that you'll only need 5 pair for the trip. You open the sock drawer, remove the 5 pairs, and place them in your suitcase (RAM), temporarily for the trip. After you return from the trip, you put the socks back in your sock drawer for future use (hopefully after cleaning them :).

Now let's apply this to a word processing file on your computer: When you use your computer to generate a word processing document, the document is temporarily stored in RAM as you edit it. When you complete the document, and click on "SAVE" or SAVE AS, you will copy that file to the hard drive for semi-permanent storage. When you close the word processing program, the file will be deleted from the RAM but will still exist on the hard drive. Tomorrow, when you want to print the document, you'll open the file, which will retrieve the file from the hard drive and add it back to the RAM, so that it may be edited or printed.

Answer 5

Not really, but sort of. If you are dealing with 500 MB files, it doesn't make much sense to have 32 MB of ram, so if file size is a concern the amount of memory available should be commensurate to MBs needed for files. Also, someone else mentioned page files, this is a relationship between HDD and memory size.

Answer 6

Physical RAM no, Virtual RAM maybe. Your operating system swaps data out on a regular basis to the hard drive to make room for programs running in RAM. It is technically possible hard drive size will limit this, but not on the multi-gigabyte level.

-Dio

Answer 7

No. However, your paging file resides on your Hard Drive, so you should have at least twice the amount of the size of your RAM available on your hard drive for that.

Answer 8

Not Really

Ram speeds up the process and depends upon the processor
Hard drive is where the program is sitting even it has a speed as how fast it can read the data

Everything together helps to speed the process but individually they are not interrelated.

Regards
Kishore

Answer 9

No, your hard drive and RAM are 2 completely different things.

Answer 10

well there is no relationship
they are totally different part, and u need both for a PC
memory are faster and used to run applications