Conventional wisdom holds that SSDs will someday displace all HDDs, but in reality SSDs are proving to be more of a challenge to the DRAM market than to the HDD market.
Right now you are probably reviewing the date of this post to make sure it’s not dated April 1. I assure you that this is the truth. To understand it, though, you must look at a computer as a computer architect would, or, in other words, the way that an application program sees the memory/storage hierarchy.
To the application program there is no HDD and memory, there is only memory. The Virtual Memory system, a part of the operating system, hides the difference between the two by moving code and data into DRAM as it is needed and back onto the HDD when it is no longer important, without telling the application program that it is moving anything around. I like to tell people that the DRAM makes the HDD look fast, and the HDD makes the DRAM look big.
If you think of the DRAM as something that makes the HDD look fast, then additional DRAM should help to make the Continue reading “Why DRAM is Threatened by SSDs”
