Hard drives and RAM
Computers have different types of storage devices. The non volatile storage devices used in computers are called hard drives.
In hard drives, data are stored on magnetic surfaces in the form of platters. Data is stored in digitally encoded format in hard drives.
Hard drives were introduced for use with general purpose computers. later they were expanded to facilitate much more uses like video recorders, PDAs, video game consoles etc. tolerance of hard drives are high as compared to the normal floppy disk drives.
As a result, hard drives can store more amounts of data as compared to the removable storage media. They have a faster access and transmission as well.
RAM is another category of computer storage. This is the abbreviation for random access storage and as the name indicates, it allows a random access without the need for accessing in an order.
RAM in modern computers is in the form of integrated circuits and hence data can be retrieved from any location in a constant time.
In such an access mode, the physical location of the data or the relation of data to its previous pieces becomes irrelevant. This differentiates it from the storage mechanisms used in hard drives and optical discs.
The movements in such devices take more time than data transfer and hence the time taken to return data will depend on the physical location of data.
RAM is associated with a volatile form of memory. As soon as the power is switched off, this memory contents will be lost.
There are different forms of RAM such as SRAM, DRAM, etc. swapping is performed in computers when RAM becomes low due to intensive applications.
In such cases, computers use hard drive space as an additional memory. A constant relying on RAM is not advised as this is unreliable.
April 24th, 2009at 5:04 pm
Great stuff. Nice to read some well written posts. A long way between them.