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You can also purchase a larger hard drive for the Mac OS X startup disk or an additional internal hard drive for data files. Most obviously, you'll have to add additional physical RAM into your computer - ideally up to the maximum limit your Mac will accept. There are only a few permanent solutions out there. These problems are even more likely to occur when your startup disk is also nearly full and any free disk space is taken up by swap files.

It can also lead to, among other things, an inability to burn CDs or DVDs, install software (either via Software Update or using third-party installers), and to enable or disable FileVault®. This lower operating efficiency doesn't just mean slower performance. Slower speeds mean exactly what you'd think: you hard drive activity LED will flash continuously and your computer will slow down - and the more virtual memory your hard drive needs to use, the slower your computer will get. While in theory this sounds fine, in reality your hard drive read/write speeds are much slower than the RAM read/write speeds. That's because when your computer runs out of memory it will start to use the hard drive space for "virtual memory" to compensate.

The easy answer to that question: Your computer will start to work less efficiently. So what happens when your computer runs out of RAM? Hard drive space, on the other hand, is physical storage space, which determines how many files you can permanently store on your drive. The higher your RAM, the more memory capacity your computer has and the more efficiently it operates. RAM is used as temporary storage ("memory") by your computer, which determines the amount of applications and services the computer can have opened and running. You're probably thinking: Wait, what's the difference between RAM and hard drive space?
