Yesterday, a friend of mine asked me this question:
“Do you think that 740GB of harddrive space will be balanced with 2GB of memory?”
A little weird, but I understand the meaning. He is concerned that adding more harddrive space to a PC will slow it down, because more harddrive space needs more memory so it doesn’t flog itself all day.
There is a little flaw in the logic, though, so I’ll give a short answer here. It is fine, you can add even 750 more gigabyte without worrying.
Now for the long answer.
First, we need to understand what RAM does in your PC. Wikipedia page here, you just need to scan through it.
Random Access Memory is used as a temporary storage that holds the data your CPU (processor, if you will) is processing. Pretty much all it does is just feeding unprocessed data from the harddrive to the CPU and sending back any data that needs to be written to the hard drive.
The data it needs to hold, by the way, depends on what you’re doing. Hammering away at Microsoft Word only adds a little memory usage from the amount already used by your operating system. Play Crysis, though, and you’ll need an extra gigabyte for keeping textures, levels, models, configurations, and so on. Using professional 3D applications like Maya or 3Ds Max needs a respectable amount of memory, too.
Your operating system also needs some memory space to run nicely. Older Windows version, like Windows 98 only needs a few tens of megabytes. Windows Vista, on the other hand, can use one gigabyte nicely. Sane people sticks with XP, which needs a few hundred megabytes, but is a mature operating system by now.
Even if you have five 500GB harddrives tied in JBOD setup, you don’t need much more memory compared to using one 250GB drive. Yes, you need some memory space to keep the JBOD setup working nicely, but that’s about it.
In conclusion, the amount of memory you need is not related to the amount of harddrive space you have. It correlates to what operating systems you are using, what applications you are opening, and what files you are actually working on.
