Question: Would this make the term ‘disk drive’ a slight misnomer?
Also, I thought RAM was equivalent to the term ‘volatile’ memory, but apprently ‘hard disk drives’ are also RAM and not ROM… any clarification is appreciated!
Answer: Yeah, the terms have become a bit messy.
The term “drive” originally referred to the thing moving the storage media – like a floppy drive is something you put a floppy disk into and it spins it. ?A tape drive is the thing that drives the tape around the read-write heads. ?Originally with a hard disk, the drive was separate from the disk platters – you used to load the hard disk into the disk drive. ?Now, the drive is built-in. ?So a hard disk drive is referring to both the disk and the drive at the same time.
Now we have “solid state drive” or “solid state disk” which contains no drives and no disks. ?
These are storage media, ie where you keep applications and files.
RAM is volatile memory (usually) and where an application or the OS is loaded in order to run it. It is based on silicon chips rather than magnetic media.
A hard disk would never be referred to as RAM. ?The only time these two ideas get close is where an operating system might pretend it has extra RAM than it really does by using part of the hard disk as “swap” or virtual ram. ?Basically, the OS will swap unused contents of RAM to disk to free memoryfor other applications, then swap them back again when they are needed.