Anders Johansson wrote:
This has nothing to do with age. RAM stands for (and has always stood for) Random Access Memory. It refers to how you access it. The opposite is Sequential memory. RAM simply means that you can access any part without first having to read through all the bits before it first.
Of course, a harddrive really works by sequential access. It may _look_ as if it's RAM, but if you want the bit that's diametrically opposite the r/w head, the r/w head will read through the sectors until it gets to what you want. In earlier days, many optimisation schemes depended on this behaviour - IBMs DFSORT for instance knew the rotational speeds of the various disk-models, and was able to optimise processing according to that. /Per Jessen, Zürich -- http://www.spamchek.com/freetrial - managed anti-spam and anti-virus solution. Sign up for your free 30-day trial now!