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this post was submitted on 21 Jan 2024
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Question: modern systems can mount hundreds of GB or even terabytes of RAM, right? At this point, why not mount non-volatile storage as RAM? Performance should increase since data wouldn't have to be loaded.
What you’re describing is the holy grail of computer memory technology. If we had nonvolatile memory as fast as RAM, we would absolutely be using it instead. Unfortunately even the fastest SSD today would be a significant drop in speed from modern RAM.
Would it be faster than loading gigabytes of data from an SSD over NVMe into RAM?
If you're only loading data to access it once, then yes, but it almost never is the case - some specific programs might do it, but OS definitely caches pretty much everything it can in RAM for subsequent access - Linux, for example, fills unused RAM with cache