Comment on Anon updates GNU/linux
rtxn@lemmy.world 2 days agoKids? I regularly interact with PhD students that don’t know how to open a fucking ZIP archive. I’ve had one that thought that “SSD” was a kind of RAM, and insisted on installing Windows on a hard drive. I’ve had one that couldn’t grasp the idea of 2FA. I’ve had one that only had a single copy of his dissertation and lost all of it when Bitlocker ate the disk.
Organic intelligence is going extinct, I swear.
I’m a middle- aged millennial going through an undergraduate university course, in my first year I had to teach some of my group work partners how to move files from one folder to another in windows.
And these are students who have chosen modules in electrical engineering, so they have more technical/ computer education than most at that age…
I’ve had one that thought that “SSD” was a kind of RAM
Well, could it be considered random access memory? I couldn’t really find a clear answer, mostly opinions.
A random-access memory device allows data items to be read or written in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location of data inside the memory, in contrast with other direct-access data storage media (such as hard disks and magnetic tape), where the time required to read and write data items varies significantly depending on their physical locations on the recording medium, due to mechanical limitations such as media rotation speeds and arm movement.
So maybe?
Although that’s basically the other end of “SSD is RAM”.
You could also install the OS to a RAMdisk.
Gigabyte even made some physical ones in the past.
The i-RAM was a PCI card-mounted, battery-backed RAM disk that behaved and was marketed as a solid-state storage device. It was produced by Gigabyte and released in June 2005, at a time when genuine solid-state storage solutions were generally still less affordable than an i-RAM product with superficially similar capabilities. The i-RAM utilised DRAM, a type of volatile memory, and was equipped with a lithium-ion battery to provide backup power.
Well, could it be considered random access memory?
Not really, a bit further down in the Wiki article it says:
RAM is normally associated with volatile types of memory where stored information is lost if power is removed.
Which is not really the case for SSDs (except for cached data that hasn’t been written yet). That said, yes you can use a SSD as RAM through pagefiles, swap partitions, or whatever, but the same is true for a HDD. So in the context of where to install an OS it’s a rather irrelevant detail. SSDs are power cycle persistent storage.
What is ‘NVRAM’ then?
A special kind of RAM that is power cycle persistent but has other downsides and thus didn’t really have success on the PC market?
entire SSD as Linux swap maybe?
fossilesque@mander.xyz 2 days ago
My bestie in my phd program had all of her data and everything on a single shitty USB. She does some coding in R so she’s not tech illiterate. I slapped that shit out her hands so fast and bought her a durable external. Lmao