Re: Computers - growth in drives but not memory

Richard Fangnail (richardfangnail@xxxxxxxxxx) writes:
Every year computers have more harddisk space but not that much more
memory. I just saw an ad for a computer with 160G drive but 512M
memory. Compared with three years ago, that drive is way bigger but
the memory is about the same.

Why is the disk size growing more than memory?

Because there is a certain level of RAM that is fine for most people.
Above that, it's just gravy. It's like all those specs for stereo
systems in the sixties and even into the seventies, you needed to watch
the specs when buying because of they were below the plateau, you'd notice.
But only high end types talk about specs, because just about anything can
now reach the minimum required.

If you had 4megs of RAM in 1996, you likely suffered. Not only were
there bloated programs that required more RAM, but you were limited
in what size files you could deal with, and even how many accessories
you could run at the same time.

But then memory price went down, and it was easy to stock up. I paid
$80 for 64K of RAM in 1984, I paid $40 for 4megs of RAM in 1996, and I
paid $20 for 128Megs of ram just a few years ago. That's brought more
than enough ram to everyone for their basic needs. Only people with
very specific need require more.

On the other hand, storage space, ie hard drive space, is by nature
accumulative. You can live with 5gigs of hard drive space to run your
operating system, but once you start saving things, especially in
this graphic intensive world, the space fills up. Photos from the
digital camera, audio files, MP3s illegally downloaded from the
internet, photos people send you, whole movies in digital format, and
the list goes on. You don't need more RAM to handle those large files,
but if you don't have the hard drive space, you can't handle those large
files.

Go back enough, and you'll find that one way of getting around lack of
RAM is to use hard drive space for overflow. Not good if you need it
all the time, but handy to have that swap partition or file in case
you do suddenly run out of memory (so the operating system swaps the
RAM to hard drive space, and moves in new stuff). It was really useful
in the days of 4megs of RAM, even if the hard drives were 240megs large,
but it's become less important as the amount of RAM has increased. On
the other hand, the large hard drives mean you can stretch that RAM
further.

Michael

.

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