IDE,SCSI,SSD,SATA or all of those.
For the record, I didn't downvote you.
OMG Ponies
2009-09-03 04:18:55
I think you did
lubos hasko
2009-09-03 04:20:18
There, I upvoted you, so now you're at zero heckavotes.
John Lockwood
2009-09-03 04:21:15
Why does the StackOverflow audit trail show a down vote by rexem?
Alex
2009-09-07 00:13:16
+5
A:
Random Access Memory (RAM) takes nanoseconds to read from or write to, while hard drive (IDE, SCSI, SATA that I'm aware of) access speed is measured in milliseconds.
OMG Ponies
2009-09-03 04:17:25
+1
A:
Hecka-lot faster.*
[ Measured using the Hecka-lot scale. :) ]
John Lockwood
2009-09-03 04:20:34
I use this scale on a day-to-day basis. It's really quite impressive, it can be used on distance, speed, weight, mass, volume, and even intangible concepts such as love and other emotions.
Carson Myers
2009-09-03 06:28:01
+6
A:
I'm surprised: Figure 3 in the middle of http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1563874 says that memory is only about 6 times faster when you're doing sequential access (350 Mvalues/sec for memory compared with 58 Mvalues/sec for disk); but it's about 100,000 times faster when you're doing random access.
ChrisW
2009-09-03 04:21:39
Which is one reason that Vista introduced ReadyBoost... even though sequential access on a flash drive is much slower than a hard drive, there are no mechanical, moving parts on the flash drive so random access is just as fast as sequential access.
Eric J.
2009-09-03 04:31:24
The link I cited said their test was using a freshly-booted machine, to avoid measuring any O/S caching.
ChrisW
2009-09-03 04:36:41
"on the flash drive random access is just as fast as sequential access" -- the link I cited says that it's 10,000 times slower.
ChrisW
2009-09-03 04:50:20
Erhm, I don't know how they tested this exactly, but RAM access in my system is in excess of 26 GB/s, 19 times faster than mentioned here. Also, the tested disks are not exactly a typical setup, unless we're talking servers specifically.
Thorarin
2009-09-03 05:06:32
http://www.tomshardware.com/picturestory/511-4-memory-scaling-ddr3.html says about 100 GB/sec for DDR3 memory. That ACM article was measuring on a server with 64 GB RAM (so I suppose possibly not the fastest/most expensive type of RAM).
ChrisW
2009-09-03 05:18:16
I don't know about 100 GB/s... I have 1800 MHz DDR3 after all. Still, it's a huge difference. To be fair, my sequential disk access is slightly faster than these figures as well, but only by a small amount (270 MB/s or so)
Thorarin
2009-09-03 05:58:27