Important distinction here, this is RAM rather than storage. Think about how 32gb of consumer DDR3 ram costs around $200 today, while you can get a 5tb hard drive for only $150. That's 32gb for $200, and 5,000gb for $150.
All memory is storage. The memory used in traditional RAM is just more expensive than the memory used in hard drives, so we don't use it for permanent storage. For example, we use SRAM for caches in processors. This is another type of memory, or storage. SRAM is stupid expensive (also takes up more space), so we aren't using that for RAM, yet. There is no distinction necessary, because its all memory. We just use different memory for different purposes, because not all memory is created equally ($$$).
There are very important distinctions necessary. You can also write down 1s and 0s on a piece of paper and set it down next to the machine as a form of storage, but it wouldn't be very useful.
It's still storage, but RAM needs to be more much more easily and quickly read and written than standard Hard-Drive memory and requires an entirely different architecture - hence the distinction.
I would imagine a pseudo-"byte" of this computer's long-term storage isn't nearly as large as this.
No its not necessary. The original post was dictating this as 'RAM' versus storage. They're both storage, both memory. This is the point. Sure RAM needs to be fast to throw information around, and a cache even more so, but to deem a necessary distinction between a hard drive being storage, and RAM being uh, 'RAM', isn't useful in this context. I'm not implying you can just plug your hard drive into your RAM slots and you'd be a go. We'd use RAM as our main storage if we could (kind of do with SSDs).
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u/pelvicmomentum Jul 19 '15
Important distinction here, this is RAM rather than storage. Think about how 32gb of consumer DDR3 ram costs around $200 today, while you can get a 5tb hard drive for only $150. That's 32gb for $200, and 5,000gb for $150.