Why Adding RAM to Your Computer Can Speed it Up

Many people hear on a daily basis that simply by adding RAM to their computer they will get a major speed improvement. While the amount of speed improvement varies based on the system, there are very sound reasons why a computer user should add RAM to their computer system if they are looking for an inexpensive way of getting a faster computer without having to buy a new one.

There are a few places in your computer where your computer stores data. The hard drive is by far the slowest. Conventional hard drives are made of spinning magnetic platters where data is written in 1's and 0's using a magnetic read right head. For a simple analogy, reading the data is like an old record player spinning and the head reading the data underneath it. The reason this is the slowest data storage part of your computer is because the platters themselves can only spin at a finite speed, generally around 7200 RPM, and the data can only be read out one bit at a time.
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The next level of data storage is the RAM, or Random Access Memory. The reading and writing data to RAM is much faster, maybe even hundreds of times faster, than reading and writing from a hard drive. The data is stored as ones and zeros in arrays of transistors. RAM speed is rated based on the clock that is used to run the digital logic. Current speeds on the average computer are around 800 MHz to over 1 GHz.

The fastest memory space on your computer is on your processor itself. This space is called Cache, and it is where the processor stores the data it is currently using, or has used most recently. Accessing data in cache can be many times faster than accessing data in RAM, maybe hundreds of times faster depending on the computer.

The way your computer accesses data is that it first looks to see of the data it wants is in cache, if not then it goes to the next level and checks if it is in RAM, and if it is not in RAM then it has to go all the way to the slowest level and retrieve the data from the hard drive. It will then copy the data it needs to the cache on the processor, and if the data is coming from the hard drive it is copied to the RAM so it can be stored more readily should it be removed from the cache to make room for other data. Adding more RAM speeds up your computer because your computer would then have to read data from your hard drive less often. More data could be stored in the RAM, thus eliminating the need to spend a lot of time waiting for data to be read from the hard drive so that the processor can perform the desired calculations.