3 ms·
Never thought about it before, but I guess SSDs are random access, so it would be technically correct to call them RAM, and that’s my favorite kind of correct.
by 9991 4y ago
Never thought about it before, but I guess SSDs are random access, so it would be technically correct to call them RAM, and that’s my favorite kind of correct.
- atq2119 4y agoJumping on the nitpick train: SSDs are less randomly write-access memory because of the requirement to explicitly erase an entire block before you can rewrite it. RAM doesn't have this constraint. It has other constraints, like writing and refreshing rows at a time, but combined with the difference in erase cycles causing wear in flash, you do end up with a significant difference in just how randomly you can access these memories.
- tromp 4y agoSRAM is the only type of memory offering true random access. DRAM can suffer so much on pure random access that completely rewriting your algorithm to have mostly sequential access to 20x more memory still ends up 4x faster (lean miner vs mean miner in [1]). [1] https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo
- account42 4y agoWell as long as we are nitpicking: random access does not say anything about the block size - you're not going to be writing individual random bits whith any kind of memory. And random access also does not say that all blocks have the same access time, only that the time does not depend on what you have accessed previously. In conclusion, an array of spinning rust drives is random access memory.