Adding RAM

The first point we would like to make is that the hard-drive and RAM are functionally equivalent to the microprocessor performing the calculations. They are both storage devices of different forms, and any RAM-intensive program can be rewritten to instead use the hard-drive. Therefore, it is not absolutely critical for a bioinformatian to get a high-RAM computer for running an NGS assembler, because the assembler can be rewritten to use the much cheaper hard-drive. Biggest advantage of using RAM instead of hard-drive comes from the time savings, because a piece of data takes lot longer to move back and forth between hard-drive and processor than between memory and processor.