Different Kinds of Memory as Fast As Possible
Techquickie
·Techquickie
·2014-05-07
·
1,147 words · ~5 min read
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you know what drives me berserk memory i mean the word itself is fine actually
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it's a fun game for kids an iconic song from cats and without mine i'd have a
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pretty hard time making these videos but no my problem with the word memory is
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the confusion that it causes ask a dozen
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big box sales people how much memory you know this computer has and i guarantee
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you that while some of them will tell you it has 16 gigs of RAM
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others will report the capacity of the SSD or the hard drive instead and
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therein lies the problem you just got potentially three different answers and
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worse none of them are really quite
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wrong this problem exists because most folks aren't aware that there are so
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many different types of memory inside a single pc but don't worry we're going to
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take care of all of that at the end of this video you'll be correctly referring
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to the memory types in your pc like a champ let's start with dram what most
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people are referring to when they talk about computer memory dynamic random
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access memory is optimized to sit in a sweet spot where it delivers high
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performance and high density or capacity at a reasonable cost ddr3 is an example
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of dram and it's all volatile memory which means that once you cut power to
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it anything stored in dram quickly fades
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away and on top of that this is the dynamic part of the dram thing is it's
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unable to retain data even while it's powered on if it's not being constantly
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refreshed or rewritten the good news is that dram isn't used for long-term
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storage and most of it will be set up for your CPU or graphics processor to
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use as working memory that contains only the information needed to help them
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complete the task at hand and nothing more so these characteristics are not
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detrimental in any way next up is sram
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this stands for static random access memory it's a volatile storage medium
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just like dram but the key difference is that it is capable of delivering much
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higher performance and that while it's receiving power it doesn't need to
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refresh each bit periodically just to keep it from fading the data will wait
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instead to be overwritten modern high performance cpus use sram as a way to
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store the data your CPU needs most right next to it for frequent fast
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access but due to its cost it's typical for
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this cache to have a capacity of only a few megabytes flash memory which is a
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subset of eeprom is the first type of memory in our rundown that is
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non-volatile meaning that data is retained even when there is no power
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being provided to the chips this feature comes with a significant performance
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reduction and a limited number of
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program erase or write cycles though
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this is a necessary trade-off though because nandflash is used to store
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things like the operating system applications and other important data
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that can't be erased whenever the system is powered down in a consumer pc or
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device an SSD is an example of something that uses nand flash but in spite of the
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fact that i just said it has reduced performance it's still much faster than
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a more traditional hard drive the only drawback here is that due to their much
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higher cost compared to a hard drive typical capacities for SSD devices are
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tens or hundreds of gigabytes in you know portable devices or up to a
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thousand gigabytes or a terabyte in high performance computers nand flash is also
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used in low cost products like usb thumb drives but the chips used for those are
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much lower performance and not capable of as many program erase cycles our last
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memory type is mechanical storage or the hard drive
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note the use of the word storage there calling it memory is actually a bit of a
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stretch even though it does store data like the other technologies we've
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discussed it's very very different hard drives use a right head to store data as
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a series of ones and zeros so it's still digital storage in the same way that you
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know anything else is storing this data digitally but it's on a magnetic
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recording layer on a disk called a platter that is spinning anywhere from
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fifty four hundred to seventy two hundred times per minute around in a
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typical hard drive now hard drives have been a staple of personal computers
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since the 60s and while they're not nearly as fast as any of the other
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memory types covered here due to the physical movement required to access
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them they are still going to be important for a long time as a cost
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effective mass storage medium that doesn't degrade when it's not plugged
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into anything speaking of not being plugged into anything hotspot shield is
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the easy and expensive way to set up a vpn solution for your pcs and devices
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their elite membership which you can save 20 on by checking out the link in
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the video description and using offer code Linus works for up to five devices
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including iOS and Android devices it helps you maintain your anonymity online
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by masking your ip address now the way a vpn accomplishes this is by rerouting
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all of your traffic securely through a remote centralized server so to the
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websites you're visiting the traffic appears to be coming from hotspot
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shields data center but it's actually coming from you now while this
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technology rerouting traffic isn't likely to improve your ping times for
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gaming it does have some other benefits as well that make it worthwhile
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including allowing you to access services that you otherwise wouldn't be
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able to such as us netflix if you live outside of the usa so once again guys
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check out the link in the video description to learn more and don't forget to use offer code Linus to save
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20 thanks for watching this episode as fast as possible on techwiki i hope you guys
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enjoyed it like it if you liked it dislike it if you disliked it we do
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appreciate your feedback it means a lot to us you can feel free to leave
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comments on you know future episodes that you'd like to see here on fast as
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possible as well and thanks again for watching and as always don't forget to subscribe to techwiki for more fastest
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possible episodes just like this and i will take a breath at some point here
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and we're done