Can a SSD drive replace RAM?

[ardouronerous]

I have an old 9-year-old Gateway Desktop and the RAM is DDR2, which is becoming rarer to find nowadays, and if the RAM fails for whatever reason, is it possible to replace the RAM with a SSD drive?

[montag dp]

You need to have at least some RAM for the computer to operate. In theory, you could use just enough RAM to boot and then configure a partition of your SSD as swap to handle the rest, but that would not be a good idea. You'd be much better off just stocking up on some extra DDR2 RAM while you can still find it, if you want to keep that computer running long-term.

[Michael_McKenney]

Putting a swap on SSD drive can kill it faster. It is cheaper to add ram. Use the SSD for your OS but install a SATA drive and move your paging and temp files to it. Ubuntu is very happy with my 6GB of RAM and 12 GB swap partition. I don't really hit the swap partition. My Windows 7 box is 16GB of RAM with a 32GB paging file. I am planning on upgrading it to 32-64GB of RAM sooner than later. My apps eat ram and paging.

[mastablasta]

for the price of DDR2 you will get a descent newish used PC. think about it.

i am in similar situation (13 years old desktop). it will last while it lasts, then i will switch the whole thing. as long as the data is safe...

[Michael_McKenney]

I just picked up 4GB of DDR2 for $60 at Microcenter on sale. Newegg has sales on it all the time.

[QIII]

Are you aware that RAM access, even DDR2, is faster than even SSD access by orders of magnitude?

Swap was a costly speed compromise that was necessary when RAM was even more astronomically expensive than astronomically expensive storage.

Could you run on swap? Sure, if you had just enough RAM to get by. Do you want to live in the 1970s? Probably not. We used to do a lot of doodling and napping waiting for things to happen.

[ardouronerous]

I just picked up 4GB of DDR2 for $60 at Microcenter on sale. Newegg has sales on it all the time.

I'm not really a supporter of using credit cards and online shopping, I know I'm limiting myself, but I just don't trust online shopping, I'd rather go physically to a computer store and hold, feel and test the component, that's what I did when I purchased an SSD for my old laptop.

I wish someone would create an RAM adapter for old PCs, like DDR4 or 3 to DDR2 adapter, anyone heard if there's something like that?

[1clue]

Aside of the many good points being made here already, particularly the ones about interface speed and early failures, I need to add something.

Virtual memory is a good thing to have, but a bad thing to actually use. VM was designed as an emergency fallback to prevent system failure for when system RAM was insanely expensive and they literally couldn't get enough of it on a mainframe, and rotating magnetic media was much cheaper.

The idea was that the system had enough RAM for normal processing but occasionally, in unusual circumstances the system could swap out to disk to prevent application failures or even system crashes. It was never intended to be used frequently.

The box I'm typing on started out with 6g with 12g swap, and when I detected that swap had been used I doubled it (both RAM and SWAP), and then again for the same reason doubled it again. I'm at 24g RAM right now, with 48 swap. I use tmpfs for lots of things, mostly as scratch spaces when I build applications but also as caches which need not survive reboot. As such I still maintain swap space and will continue to do so. Even though mine is not on an SSD I could safely put it there, because nothing ever gets written to disk, unless there's an exceptional situation which requires that it be done.

There are plenty of warnings about using an SSD as swap, mostly for early drive failure. An SSD would make excellent swap in the sense that it has random access speeds much greater than a spinning rust drive, but you need to accept the likeliness of early drive failure if you actually plan on using that swap significantly.

[1clue]

Another thing:

I recommend against buying RAM for a machine you can't put it in right away, at least for personal use and especially when it's already old hardware. You have no idea when or why that box will fail. It may be a lightning strike or a flood or a tornado, for all you know.

I recommend that you max out your current RAM and then run the box until it dies or until you no longer can justify keeping it.

Before you invest in any hardware, always check the prices of the hardware you intend to the price of replacement computers. I firmly believe in reduce-reuse-recycle but you need to keep your feet on the ground. I've bought brand new hardware to replace existing old hardware simply because the cost difference in the electricity used would pay for the new box in under 2 years.

[unityforever]

ddr3 RAM of my old laptop has 21600MB/S write speed and 45ns latency.
my ssd has 460MB/S write speed and 2ms(2000000ns) latency

data speak louder than words.

i can't image if someone forced to use ssd as ram, how much time his computer will cost to boot up, may be ten minutes? he may feels opening the menu is rather difficult too. don't mentioned his ssd will be broken in a month.