Secondary Memory

Secondary Memory

Secondary memory infers to storage devices, such as hard drives and solid-state drives. It may also relate to removable storage media, such as USB flash drives, CDs, and DVDs.

Incompatible primary memory, secondary memory is not accessed directly by the CPU. Rather, data accessed from secondary memory is first stacked into RAM and is then sent to the processor. The RAM fiddles an important intervening role since it provides much faster data access speeds than secondary memory. By loading software programs and files into primary memory, computers can process data much more quickly.

While secondary memory is much slower than primary memory, it generally offers far greater storage capacity. For example, a computer may have a one terabyte hard drive, but only 16 gigabytes of RAM. That means the computer has roughly 64 times more secondary memory than primary memory. Besides, secondary memory is non-volatile, meaning it conserves its data with or without electrical power. RAM, on the other hand, is erased when a computer is shut down or continued. Therefore, secondary memory is used to store "permanent data," such as the operating system, applications, and user files.

NOTE: Secondary memory may also be called "secondary storage." Still, this term is a bit more controversial, since internal storage devices are sometimes called "primary storage devices" as well