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Comment by 9991 | Hacker News Reader

I consider myself pretty tech savvy and call hard drives memory. HDDs exist in the middle of a memory hierarchy stretching from registers to cloud storage.

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You're not wrong, they are a kind of memory. I think more people would understand you if you call RAM memory and HDDs and SDDs storage though.

It goes the other way too, RAM is a type of storage, which is the terminology IBM uses (and I think has used since the 60s or so).

Memory is where you store data

I don’t really care if the unwashed masses understand me.

Do you call them RAM, though?

Never thought about it before, but I guess SSDs are random access, so it would be technically correct to call them RAM, and that’s my favorite kind of correct.

Jumping on the nitpick train: SSDs are less randomly write-access memory because of the requirement to explicitly erase an entire block before you can rewrite it. RAM doesn't have this constraint. It has other constraints, like writing and refreshing rows at a time, but combined with the difference in erase cycles causing wear in flash, you do end up with a significant difference in just how randomly you can access these memories.

SRAM is the only type of memory offering true random access. DRAM can suffer so much on pure random access that completely rewriting your algorithm to have mostly sequential access to 20x more memory still ends up 4x faster (lean miner vs mean miner in [1]).

[1] https://github.com/tromp/cuckoo

Well as long as we are nitpicking: random access does not say anything about the block size - you're not going to be writing individual random bits whith any kind of memory. And random access also does not say that all blocks have the same access time, only that the time does not depend on what you have accessed previously. In conclusion, an array of spinning rust drives is random access memory.

My mother calls the entire computer "hard drive", leftover from old newspapers in the 90'ies.

Yep. Most faculty/staff where I work either call a desktop computer a "hard drive" or a "CPU".

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