The feature has a few names. On Samsung Galaxy devices, this is called RAM Plus, but other Android phone manufacturers may call it Memory Extension or RAM Extension. To disable on a Samsung, go to Settings > Device care > tap Memory > RAM Plus. On other Android devices, go to Performance or Memory in Settings, sometimes hidden under About Phone, and look for the appropriate name. Some devices allow you to turn it off completely. Others only allow you to reduce the swap size, in which case you’ll want to choose the lowest setting, 2 GB.
After adjusting these settings, restart your device to apply the changes. After restarting, you may notice a decrease in total RAM. For example, it might show a total of 24 GB with swap enabled, but drop to 12 GB once swap is disabled. Be sure to check after a software update, as the setting may be re-enabled by the system.
Why does RAM Plus or swap space slow down your device?
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You don’t actually get more physical RAM with RAM Plus or comparable settings enabled. The device sets aside some of the internal storage, depending on the capacity you choose: 2GB, 4GB, 6GB, 8GB, or 12GB. When the phone needs more RAM than is physically available, it uses some of the virtual RAM, meaning it actually uses the internal storage at much slower access speeds. Virtual RAM is not as fast as physical RAM. This is why on devices that already have a lot of RAM it can slow them down, while it helps when RAM is limited. At 12GB or more, the system has enough physical RAM to balance apps and multitasking, but once it has to move to slower storage, it creates a host of complications. Keep in mind that this works differently on Samsung devices, which we’ll explore in more detail later.
Virtual RAM can increase wear and tear on your phone’s hardware. Constant reading and writing can increase heat build-up and drain the battery faster. All of these things can and will contribute to your experience; even if not directly, they can cause crashes, cause applications to close aggressively, and much more. If you are wondering how much RAM your smartphone actually needs to function properly, the ideal solution is 12 GB, but 8 GB will be enough. If you have a lower value, you may want to keep RAM Plus or Expansion settings enabled.
If you’re in the market for a new phone with more RAM, there are a few affordable smartphones that are ridiculously overpowered on this front.
Samsung’s RAM Plus is a little different from conventional trade-in options
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I don’t want to go over the description above, but Samsung’s RAM Plus feature works a little differently than conventional swap measures. It still creates virtual RAM, but instead of using internal storage, it allocates part of the RAM as zRAM, following the same principles. This may also explain why the phone slows down when you have a large amount of RAM; it actually uses part of it for exchange operations. This effectively means that if you set your Samsung’s RAM Plus capacity to 4GB and your phone has 8GB of physical RAM, you allocate half of it to zRAM.
This works on budget Samsung phones because the small portion of RAM dedicated to zRAM compresses data at a much higher rate. In short, this means that more data can be stored in memory, theoretically allowing for better multitasking and faster operations with fewer resources.
So, unlike other Android devices, Samsung phones and tablets do not use internal storage. Sammobile reports that you can even observe this before and after changing your RAM Plus settings, as the amount of free storage will remain the same.
