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[-] rtxn@lemmy.world 36 points 2 days ago

Kids? I regularly interact with PhD students that don't know how to open a fucking ZIP archive. I've had one that thought that "SSD" was a kind of RAM, and insisted on installing Windows on a hard drive. I've had one that couldn't grasp the idea of 2FA. I've had one that only had a single copy of his dissertation and lost all of it when Bitlocker ate the disk.

Organic intelligence is going extinct, I swear.

[-] Sadbutdru@sopuli.xyz 6 points 2 days ago

I'm a middle- aged millennial going through an undergraduate university course, in my first year I had to teach some of my group work partners how to move files from one folder to another in windows.

And these are students who have chosen modules in electrical engineering, so they have more technical/ computer education than most at that age...

[-] fossilesque@mander.xyz 6 points 2 days ago* (last edited 2 days ago)

My bestie in my phd program had all of her drafts and data and literally everything on a single shitty generic cheap USB thumb drive. She does some coding in R and works with technical equipment, so she's not tech illiterate. I slapped that shit out her hands so fast and bought her a small durable external. Lmao

[-] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 2 days ago

I’ve had one that thought that “SSD” was a kind of RAM

Well, could it be considered random access memory? I couldn't really find a clear answer, mostly opinions.

Wikipedia says:

A random-access memory device allows data items to be read or written in almost the same amount of time irrespective of the physical location of data inside the memory, in contrast with other direct-access data storage media (such as hard disks and magnetic tape), where the time required to read and write data items varies significantly depending on their physical locations on the recording medium, due to mechanical limitations such as media rotation speeds and arm movement.

So maybe?

Although that's basically the other end of "SSD is RAM".
You could also install the OS to a RAMdisk.
Gigabyte even made some physical ones in the past.

The i-RAM was a PCI card-mounted, battery-backed RAM disk that behaved and was marketed as a solid-state storage device. It was produced by Gigabyte and released in June 2005, at a time when genuine solid-state storage solutions were generally still less affordable than an i-RAM product with superficially similar capabilities. The i-RAM utilised DRAM, a type of volatile memory, and was equipped with a lithium-ion battery to provide backup power.

[-] Muehe@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 days ago

Well, could it be considered random access memory?

Not really, a bit further down in the Wiki article it says:

RAM is normally associated with volatile types of memory where stored information is lost if power is removed.

Which is not really the case for SSDs (except for cached data that hasn't been written yet). That said, yes you can use a SSD as RAM through pagefiles, swap partitions, or whatever, but the same is true for a HDD. So in the context of where to install an OS it's a rather irrelevant detail. SSDs are power cycle persistent storage.

[-] piccolo@sh.itjust.works 1 points 2 days ago
[-] Muehe@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

A special kind of RAM that is power cycle persistent but has other downsides and thus didn't really have success on the PC market?

[-] piccolo@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

Its not 'special kind'. Flash memory is a type of nvram. It was a test to see if you would catch on. Theres also neat things like phase change RAM, aka DVD-RAM.

[-] Muehe@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

Well it's special in the sense that opposed to the most common kind of RAM, DRAM and SRAM, it has non volatile storage. Which is why it's referred to as NVRAM instead of simply RAM. Saying RAM usually implies volatile storage in a PC, certainly does in the context of an OS install on a HDD and SSD, and in that context a SSD isn't RAM. Yes there are minutiae to the terminology, but I don't see how that's relevant here.

[-] piccolo@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

Its relevant because its primary use doesnt change how the memory is accessed. The only reason NVRAM doesnt see use as primary system ram is that they are much slower and many types have limited write cycles making them unsuitable for the job.

[-] Muehe@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

In the context of setting up a PC a SSD is a drive, not RAM. You couldn't pull out your RAM DIMMs and just run on your NVME/SATA SSD as RAM instead (unless your CPU/MB support that which to my knowledge isn't common). I'm not saying that flash memory isn't random access memory in the general sense of the word, I'm saying that when talking about a PC specifically RAM refers to special memory the motherboard makes directly available to the CPU, and a SSD isn't that.

[-] piccolo@sh.itjust.works 1 points 1 day ago

Next you're going to tell me Apple Macs are not PCs.

[-] Muehe@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago

No I'm going to tell you that is still irrelevant. The OP said:

I’ve had one that thought that “SSD” was a kind of RAM, and insisted on installing Windows on a hard drive.

It seems the student thought a SSD is RAM in the sense of "volatile CPU storage" and thus unfit for an OS install. And a SSD is not RAM in that sense of the word.

[-] Turret3857@infosec.pub 2 points 2 days ago

entire SSD as Linux swap maybe?

[-] user224@lemmy.sdf.org 3 points 2 days ago

Been there, done that:

But that was a HDD instead.

[-] LostXOR@fedia.io 2 points 2 days ago

Turning RAM latency up from nanoseconds to milliseconds!

[-] swab148@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 1 day ago

Reminds me of that person who mounted their Google drive as swap

this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2025
996 points (100.0% liked)

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