Ty Christian English
Allied American University
Short Response
Discuss where a computer stores its basic hardware settings, why it does so, and what some of those settings are.
A computer is a very complex and complicated piece of equipment that take teams of professional’s to manage. What people seem to forget is even this enigma of hardware also have a very basic system that fires it up. This is called the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System). As the name suggests, it’s a basic function of just turning the hardware on in a particular order. It is no more complicated than the light switch in your room or the ignition in your car. A switch is closed, a piece of hardware receives a power on signal and starts its job.
Compare storage devices using four criteria: versatility, durability, speed, and capacity.
To keep this answer basic, I will discuss the basic types of storage devices made available to us today. In the current year of 2015, we have “Solid State Drives” and “Hard Disk Drives”.
With HDD’s, you can achieve very high storage capacities, moderate durability, moderate speeds, and good versatility. HDD’s are great for mobile PC’s and workstations that need to contain large amounts of data, while not needing the speeds of a SSD. HDD’s have their faults of being fragile and slow read/write speeds, but can be almost as fast as a SSD if purchasing a specific type of HDD.
The other type of storage device is SSD’s or “Solid State Drives.” Solid state drives use multiple NAND Flash chips inside of it to hold memory. SSD’s are very compact, use no moving parts, but are limited by capacity and read/write cycles. SSD’s are commonly used in phones, smaller PC’s, USB flash drives, and small devices such as cameras and TV’s.
Please explain the differences between RAM and ROM. Where are RAM chips usually configured? Why are RAM chips considered to be volatile?
Before we begin to discuss this question, let’s form knowledge of what RAM and