Why RAM? Why Not Hard drive?

[FrontSide]

RAM is electrical, HDDs are mechanical.

 

[TheMajor]

HDD's are electrical as well.

 

[m3trj]

Well the mechanism in the hard drive means that it takes much longer to access data than with RAM. With the hard drive it is measured in milliseconds, while RAM is much much much faster than that. With a hard drive the read/write head has to be physically moved to where the data is before it can be read, with RAM it is almost instantly available at request.

 

[FrontSide]

m3trj is right.

HDDs are measured in milliseconds while RAM is measured is nanoseconds.

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

wut? 0.9GIG per second is 900MB/sec.
Sounds like a pretty damn fast HD to me!

Forgot a decimal place :/

 

[gaara]

Yeah, your CPU can communicate with your memory a hell of a lot faster than any hard drive. The same goes with cache, I don't even want to guess how quickly a processor can process data from the cache...

 

[FrontSide]

Negative.

 

[TheMajor]

Forgot a decimal place :/

90MB/s is still extremely fast.

 

[Regulus]

A+ Certification by Mike Meyers. Read it, then come back to TF

I'll take a look at that.
Wouldn't another reason that the RAM is faster than an HD be that the RAM is located closer to all the other stuff like the CPU, Vid card, etc.?

 

[dale5605]

At how fast the electrons are flowing I highly doubt a few physical inches is going to make much speed difference.