Is it possible to use SSD to increase RAM size?

[hajime]

Hi, over 20 years ago, there was a software called RAM doubler. It used hard disk space to increase the size of the RAM. Given that SSD is fast, can we use part of SSD as RAM especially on MBP 2010 with only 8GB RAM max?

 

[MacUser2525]

That is what is called a swap file all modern OSs will use one if necessary if ram runs short automatically no need for a third party app.

 

[Toutou]

Exactly, it's what the OS does by itself.

 

[Gav2k]

As above but when you say an ssd is fast it is by no means fast in comparison to ram leave the OS to do what it's good at doing and please don't install silly apps in the hope it'll help.

 

[Samuelsan2001]

Hi, over 20 years ago, there was a software called RAM doubler. It used hard disk space to increase the size of the RAM. Given that SSD is fast, can we use part of SSD as RAM especially on MBP 2010 with only 8GB RAM max?

8gb of Ram is still a huge amount, and OSX automatically uses your hard drive when needed it also uses RAM compression allowing 8gb to act as up to 12gb under certain conditions.

Have you checked your ram usage to see if any more is needed?? Unless you never close any program or run multiple VM's RAM is unlikely to be your issue, if your computer is the 13 inch MBP, it's far more likely that the now fairly poor core 2 duo CPU and 320M iGPU is your problem....

 

[ProjectManager101]

It will help yeah but never as fast as ram. It all depends on what sort of software you are working on.
I had a Mac Book Pro 17" with 4GB of ram (or two), I upgraded to 6GB and navigate became instant, then I replaced the drive for a SSD and opening applications and start up was way faster. I do not know what you want to do with 8GB, having the SSD will help BUT it wasn't meant for that.

 

[Dsching]

The ssd will be used for swap files, just as any old hdd was in the past.

It cannot fully extend your ram, because ssds are worlds slower than ram.

 

[phrehdd]

Hi, over 20 years ago, there was a software called RAM doubler. It used hard disk space to increase the size of the RAM. Given that SSD is fast, can we use part of SSD as RAM especially on MBP 2010 with only 8GB RAM max?

If you are referring to the actual product RAM Doubler - it would first handle how it loaded memory. Things were quite different then and these were the three things it did (best I recall)

Load only what apps really needed to work in RAM
Used a modified allocation of RAM that was akin to compressing data
and
if more RAM was needed, it would temporarily write to disk (this was the LAST choice)

As for SSD vs RAM, others here covered it quite well. The only thing one might be able to do is simply make sure all swap/scratch files point to the SSD and possibly temp files etc. These are volatile write/read operations with fair frequencies for some applications. In truth, 8 gigs should be sufficient for all but the hungriest of applications (See Adobe software as a prime example).

I am a big advocate of getting more RAM than one thinks they might need but if you have 8 gigs of RAM, the next best upgrade would be to acquire an SSD.