Volatile and non-volatile data and the order of volatility
In this section, we look at why data is lost when power to the volatile memory is lost.
Data can exist if the media it is stored on can store the data. Hard drives (mechanical and solid-state), flash drives, and memory cards are all non-volatile storage media. Although SSDs offer and continue to make drastic improvements in data access times, RAM (typically referred to only as memory) thus far remains the faster type of memory inside devices.
RAM, however, is volatile memory. Unlike non-volatile memory found in hard drives and flash drives, data stored in RAM is kept there temporarily, only for as long as there is an electrical current being provided to the chips. There are two types of RAM that we need to be aware of: Static RAM (SRAM) and Dynamic RAM (DRAM).
SRAM is superior to DRAM but is far costlier than DRAM because of the extensive materials used in building the chips. SRAM is also physically much larger than...
