[revenge2]

Hello there is using a hard disk as ram beneficial???

[Snake91839]

not really, the only reason for virtual ram really is to help your computer out if it is already using all of the physical ram.

The problem with using virtual ram is plain and simple, it is not as fast.

Physical ram, is much much faster because there is a direct bus to the physical ram connecting it directly to it's own section of the CPU which is made to process this memory.

Using Virtual ram is slower, because it has to go through the part of the CPU that deals with the hard drive, and then be processed through the Memory controller.

Bottom line is, to get better system performance, get physical ram, and get a lot of you want a lot virtual memory is just a fail safe

[turtile]

Virtual memory can also make the best use of physical memory as well. Lets say you are using all the memory in one program and you don't want to turn it off to work on the something else. With virtual memory, the data from the previous program can leave the memory to the hard drive, freeing the memory for your current use.

[Snake91839]

^^^^ absolutely true, so it will help you quite a bit, and is useful. However, cannot really be used as a substitute for good old physical RAM

[gaara]

Just compare, average SATA sustained transfer rates are around 70-80mb/sec with a burst speed from cache topping at 300mb/sec for SATAII. Average memory bandwidth for current generation processors would probably be at least 6000mb/sec

[ShackledPhoenix]

A simple breakdown of what Virtual memory is.

Virtual Memory is a temporary storage for all data that cannot fit into your physical memory. If you have 512 MB of memory and you're running a program that takes 380 MB and want to start another program that takes 250 MB, it wouldn't all fit into memory right? so it takes all the data in memory from the first program and puts it onto the hard drive as virtual memory and then loads the second program into physical memory. It then swaps the data back and forth as needed. This way it can keep programs running if there's not enough physical memory.

Now your hard drive is much slower, so things won't run as fast from virtual memory. More physical memory means less need for virtual memory, which means your PC has to wait on the hard drive less.

So yes virtual memory is good to have (Usually set it to 1.5-3X the Physical Memory), but it does slow the PC down if it's used to much.