You may have seen the ‘RAM Boost’ or ‘RAM expansion’ option on your smartphone. This allows you to add virtual working memory to your smartphone. But what good is that? And how does it differ from real working memory?
Is ‘virtual working memory’ mainly a marketing ploy?
Every smartphone has a certain amount of RAM on board. RAM stands for Random Access Memory and is often translated in Dutch as working memory. RAM is very fast and communicates directly with the processor in your phone. It can display the stored data, such as information in open apps, on your screen without delay.
In other words: working memory is crucial for how smoothly your smartphone works. If apps have to be completely reloaded every time you open them, it will cause a lot of lag and frustration. You can compare it with the short-term memory of humans. If you forget what you did fifteen minutes ago, it becomes difficult to live a normal life.
Modern smartphones often have 4, 8, 12 or 16GB of RAM. More and more manufacturers, including OnePlus and Motorola, offer the option to virtually expand the RAM by, for example, another 4 or 8GB. This often has a flashy name like ‘RAM Boost’. For this purpose, part of the internal storage (the ‘hard drive’) is sacrificed. When the real RAM is full, your device switches to the virtual version.
Disadvantages of virtual working memory
Of course it sounds ideal: adding more RAM to your smartphone at the touch of a button. Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. As mentioned, RAM is very fast. That’s not the storage of your smartphone. Cheap devices in particular sometimes still use eMMC memory cards. They are extremely slow compared to RAM.
If you use eMMC as RAM, your phone will still feel slow when you switch between apps. In fact, there is usually no noticeable difference between simply reloading the app. A second disadvantage: eMMC has a limited lifespan and is really intended as storage. If you continuously add and delete information, there is a good chance that the memory card will break over time.
More expensive smartphones such as the OnePlus 12 use UFS storage. That’s a lot faster than eMMC. RAM expansion can help your smartphone function better if you have a lot of apps or tabs open at the same time. However, these types of devices often already have at least 12GB of normal RAM. That is almost always sufficient for smooth operation.
In the vast majority of cases, virtual working memory is mainly a marketing trick. He makes you believe that you get more than what you pay for. Even UFS storage is not as fast as real RAM and has a limited lifespan. Moreover, your smartphone has to work harder to load data from its internal storage. This can slow down your device and drain your battery faster.
Why is there a difference between storage and working memory?
After reading this article, you may be thinking: if RAM is so much faster than internal storage, why isn’t that storage also made of RAM? Wouldn’t that make my smartphone much faster?
In theory yes, but there are two reasons why that will probably never happen. When you turn off your smartphone, the working memory is erased. In principle, it is not intended for permanently storing data. Perhaps something can be done about this, but RAM is also much more expensive than normal storage. A smartphone with, for example, 256GB of RAM would, at least at the moment, be unaffordable.
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Source: www.androidplanet.nl
