If You Have Solid State Or Atomic Hard Drives, Why Have RAM?

Question

Hard drives are getting so fast they are as fast or faster than RAM, there can even use RAM as a hard drive, so wouldn't it be smart to take RAM away totally and just use virtual memory, or take away virtual memory and partition off a but of the Hard Drive to be RAM. It will soon be a cheaper option than loads of separate expensive RAM chips, and will be easier to change, virtual memory will be the same speed as the RAM so why have data going from hard drive to virtual memory to RAM and then back again, when you can take out the middle man and make operating systems and programs soooo much simpler to run, taking up less energy, smaller size and way faster systems... also currently couldn't be have only a small amount of RAM and speed the PC up majorly by having a solid state or atom based hard drive as virtual memory...

Am I right or wrong.. we could also use current programs we have now, just with a different operating system handling the RAM..or virtual memory, or new partition...

OK, to IncomingFire, I want you to know that I am a computer builder and a computer programmer, I also know how Windows, Windows Vista, Linux, Unix, DOS and Mac's handle RAM, although you are saying current technologies are not fast enough to match up to the current speeds of fast rams, I am trying to say that they could easily create a technology faster than RAM, it would be on the motherboard, but more likely with a cable just to extend it for ease of use.. so thanks for the contribution, but the question is still open

Firstly I want to let you all know that Flash, RAM disks and atomic drives are lightning fast, atomic drives particularly can be way faster than RAM, but they are slowed down by the cable interface such as SATA2 and USB, so I would say that within the next ten years we will have hard drives publicly available for cheap prices that are just as fast or faster than the RAM that is out at the time, the RAM interface handled by the motherboard and mainly software are very complicated and confusing and although each time something changes it only takes about 10 nano seconds, all the things build up a lot, specially when you have things like Vista, also there could be motherboards that simulate RAM so that they are backwards compatible with Operating Systems of today

Answer 1

If we ever do get to the point where Solid State Drives are as fast as RAM, then the scenario you are talking about may very well happen. However, we are not there yet, we are not even particularly close. Most of the solid state drives currently out are based on non-volitile flash memory, which is much slower than RAM. The few that are based on volitile RAM type memory are insanely expensive, and are still slower than actual RAM.

EDIT: Flash disks are NOT faster than RAM, and they are not even close, plain and simple. RAM disks are made of RAM, so quite obviously they are roughly the same speed, but like I said really expensive.

EDIT2: And after some investigation, atomic hard drives appear to have promise, but are not readily available, nor does it appear they will be any time soon.

Answer 2

Main reason is the interconnect between the solid state hard drive and the mobo. Even with SATAII the current consumer grade connections would not be fast enough to allow for such a thing. RAM is practically integrated into the motherboard the way that it is now and is available to all system devices (of course configurable through your BIOS). If you had to add the extra step of going through another interconnect to get to something your whole system was sharing, you would actually notice a significant slow down on your system, as opposed to a boost. Now that is definitely more of a system builders point of view, to be honest a programmer or hardware designer might be able to answer this question a bit better.

Answer 3

Still too slow, and too expensive.