How To Use Hard Disk As RAM In Ubuntu Linux


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I heard that it is possible to use a portion of hard disk as RAM in Windows. I wondered if this trick is available for Ubuntu, so I googled about it and couldn’t find anything related to it. But I found out an AskUbuntu answer of using USB sticks as RAM. I did the same trick on Hard Disk and it works !!
This trick can be accomplished with the use of some small commands in Terminal. The RAM memory increase can’t be noted in the System Monitor application.So, Let’s begin.
Create a file of 512 MB (The 512 indicates the RAM memory to be added):

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/subinsblog bs=4096 count=<span style="background-color: yellow;">131072</span>

The yellow background text above shows the count of the file we are going to create. This count and bs determines the file size. This is how I got the count :

<span style="background-color: yellow;">512</span> * 1024^2 / 4096 = 131072

The yellow background text above shows the file size we need to create in Mega Bytes (MB). If you need to create SWAP space with more than 512 MB change the yellow background text above to the MB you want and get the result of the calculation. The result is the count.
Example of 1 GB :

1024 * 1024^2 / 4096 = <span style="background-color: yellow;">262144</span>

and the command will become :

dd if=/dev/zero of=~/subinsblog bs=4096 count=<span style="background-color: yellow;">262144</span>

The command will create a file named subinsblog on your home directory.

Now let’s create the SWAP space on the file and enable the SWAP :

sudo mkswap ~/subinsblog -f && sudo swapon -p 1000 ~/subinsblog

You’re RAM Memory is now increased. To check whether if it is increased, do the following command :

free -m

You will get a result like below :

The picture says it all. Good Luck ! 🙂
If you have any problems/suggestions/feedback just print it out in the comment box below.

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