GATE CS 2001 Q1.20 — Memory Management and Virtual Memory

Correct Answer: B (Disk)

Explanation:

Swap space is a designated area on a secondary storage device (such as a Hard Disk Drive or Solid-State Drive) used by the operating system to implement virtual memory.

• Mechanism: When the physical memory (RAM) becomes full, the operating system's memory manager moves inactive pages or processes from the RAM to the swap space on the disk (a process known as swapping out or paging out).
• This frees up RAM for currently active processes. When those swapped-out pages are needed again, they are copied back into the RAM (swapping in).

Since swap space serves as an extension of physical memory onto secondary storage, it resides on the Disk.