On 13/12/17 13:55, Greg Freemyer wrote:
They also are not ram disks because they do not use RAM chips. Or do they?
Long ago I knew more about the chips. We used to refer to DRAM for dynamic ram. The bits in the DRAM chips would disappear in a few seconds (or less) of the data wasn't refreshed by a strobe.
And there used to be static ram. The difference between the two is that dynamic ram needs to be re-written every few nano-seconds or the charge decays. This is dealt with by extra circuitry in the SIMM/DIMM ... Static ram retains its value as long as the power line remains charged. This makes it faster (access is not interrupted by DRAM's read-rewrite cycle) but it also uses more transistors which makes it more expensive. Your typical SRAM chip usually came in packages of about 4K :-)
It is clear that NVMe SSDs don't use DRAM chips, but could one call the chips they use RAM, I don't know. I'm sure they have the internal erase block (EB) feature/architecture of SATA interfaced SSDs.
And what about core ram? The earliest ram was magnetic core, such that you could switch a computer off WHILE IT WAS RUNNING A PROGRAM, and when you switched it back on, the computer would carry on - "suspend-resume" 1950s-style ... :-) Cheers, Wol -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org