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I am getting old, but I fail to see what the usage of RAM/ROM means in advertising devices; I see many devices, including this one, stating '6G RAM, 128G ROM' =

I am getting old, but I fail to see what the usage of RAM/ROM means in advertising devices; I see many devices, including this one, stating '6G RAM, 128G ROM' => I assume 128GB is not Read-Only Memory. So why is it stated like that? I see it all over the place; phones, laptops, tablets. I understand if it's just a retailer selling, but these guys are supposed to know something about the hardware? Or am I missing something?

jchw 6y ago
Guessing the terminology stems off of EEPROM/PROM which was paradoxically, programmable ROM. It’s probably an understandable misnomer for NAND/flash storage.
- tluyben2 6y ago
  I guess you are right. I would never have figured that as someone who used eproms for devices where you could not replace firmware any other way.
- fy20 6y ago
  Just like a SSD doesn't actually contain a spinning disk, like hard disk drives and floppy disks before it :D Apple labels this as "Capacity" (iOS) and "Storage" (Mac) which are maybe better terms.
  - mkl 6y ago
    Solid-State Drive doesn't mention disks.
    - wongarsu 6y ago
      Hard drives are named that way because they are devices that spin (drive) solid disks. Similarly a floppy drive is the device spinning the floppy. You could argue that the solid state drive "drives" things in the sense of "control", or analogous to how a microcontroller drives its pins. But more likely it's named that way because "drive" has become synonymous with storage, as in "C-Drive".
      - tomxor 6y ago
        In OS terminology they are all referred to more abstractly as block devices, i.e everything that is not system memory. But I agree with the OP that calling it ROM makes no sense, it's an SSD, call it what it is.
        wongarsu 6y ago
        At least in Linux kernel terminology "block device" and "disk" seem to be used almost interchangably, for example the gendisk structure with the accompanying add_disk, alloc_disk, etc methods for creating block devices [1]. Meanwhile on a API level Windows talks about "disk drives" that abstract over "physical media" [2], but when talking to end users uses "hard drive" as the generic term, like in the sentence "You can install Windows to a hard drive, such as a hard disk drive or a solid-state drive" [3] 1: https://linux-kernel-labs.github.io/refs/heads/master/labs/block_device_drivers.html https://linux-kernel-labs.github.io/refs/heads/master/labs/b... 2: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/desktop/cimwin32a/win32-diskdrivephysicalmedia https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/d... 3: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/hard-drives-and-partitions https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...

jchw 6y ago

Guessing the terminology stems off of EEPROM/PROM which was paradoxically, programmable ROM. It’s probably an understandable misnomer for NAND/flash storage.

tluyben2 6y ago
I guess you are right. I would never have figured that as someone who used eproms for devices where you could not replace firmware any other way.
fy20 6y ago
Just like a SSD doesn't actually contain a spinning disk, like hard disk drives and floppy disks before it :D Apple labels this as "Capacity" (iOS) and "Storage" (Mac) which are maybe better terms.
- mkl 6y ago
  Solid-State Drive doesn't mention disks.
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    Hard drives are named that way because they are devices that spin (drive) solid disks. Similarly a floppy drive is the device spinning the floppy. You could argue that the solid state drive "drives" things in the sense of "control", or analogous to how a microcontroller drives its pins. But more likely it's named that way because "drive" has become synonymous with storage, as in "C-Drive".
    - tomxor 6y ago
      In OS terminology they are all referred to more abstractly as block devices, i.e everything that is not system memory. But I agree with the OP that calling it ROM makes no sense, it's an SSD, call it what it is.
      - wongarsu 6y ago
        At least in Linux kernel terminology "block device" and "disk" seem to be used almost interchangably, for example the gendisk structure with the accompanying add_disk, alloc_disk, etc methods for creating block devices [1]. Meanwhile on a API level Windows talks about "disk drives" that abstract over "physical media" [2], but when talking to end users uses "hard drive" as the generic term, like in the sentence "You can install Windows to a hard drive, such as a hard disk drive or a solid-state drive" [3] 1: https://linux-kernel-labs.github.io/refs/heads/master/labs/block_device_drivers.html https://linux-kernel-labs.github.io/refs/heads/master/labs/b... 2: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/desktop/cimwin32a/win32-diskdrivephysicalmedia https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/d... 3: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufacture/desktop/hard-drives-and-partitions https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/manufactur...