In this chapter so far, we've looked at the various media for storing data. Now I'd like to talk about the actual data itself, some of its states, and what happens when it's accessed.
What about the data?
Data states
Firstly, there's data in transit, also called data in motion. These simply describe data on the move, perhaps traversing across the network between devices or even between storage media, actively moving between locations.
Then there's data in use. Data in this state is currently being accessed by a user, or processed by a CPU. When data is accessed or used, it's pulled from the hard drive and temporarily stored in RAM, which is much faster than the hard drive (particularly mechanical...