Hardware is a generally new subject to me. I am a Marketing major will very little background in computer knowledge. When it comes down to it, computer knowledge is like another language to me; it's foreign in almost every way. This was initially the reason I took the class, as a challenge and an opportunity to delve into unfamiliar territory. But even with my elementary knowledge, I still found many of the topics in this module to be interesting, in particular, memory and storage. Although somewhat complicated to the computer newbie, I figured the best way for a newbie to learn is to hear it from a newbie.
The first topic I found particularly interesting was cache. To understand cache though, there needs to be a basic memory of Random Access Memory, or RAM. RAM is basically where all the work gets done. It is the general memory in your computer and is used to perform the necessary tasks when the computer is on. While RAM is substantially faster than it used to be, your computer has much more potential for speed, and that's where cache comes in. Cache is a block of a small quantity of high speed memory located in the RAM. As shown in the picture, imagine RAM as a large circle of memory. Inside that circle is another small circle called the cache, only this circle is much quicker and more efficient. You make several requests as you use your computer, and if you make certain requests several times then the data will be stored in the cache memory. The next time you go to make that same request, your command will be sufficed much quicker because your CPU will request the data from the cache. An easy way to think about it is to relate it to when you fold clothes in your drawer. Naturally you will put the clothes you wear most often at the top of the pile. For example you would put your favorite shirt at the top of the pile especially if you knew you were going to wear it soon. Taking out that shirt to wear takes very little time because it's easily accessible. If you wanted to wear a different shirt, let's say the one at the bottom of the pile, you could still retrieve it pretty easily, but it would obviously take more time to search through the pile.
When watching the lectures I found fragmentation to be particularly interesting as well. When you save files on your computer they are not necessarily stored on a disk in one continuous piece because throughout the lifetime of your computer you are constantly saving new files and deleting old ones. Fragmentation occurs because your computer wants to be as efficient as possible. It's almost like a game of Tetris. Consider the following situation, and I'll make the numbers as easy as possible for simplicity's sake:
1) You have a rectangle dish that's 40 inches long
2) You put 5 in of red jello in the rectangle
3) You then put 10 in of green jello in the rectangle
4) Then you put 7 in of blue jello
5) You then take out the red jello and the blue jello
6) Now you want to put in 8 in of yellow jello, but to be more efficient on space you want to start putting it in from the beginning of the dish. So you put in 5 in to the right of the green jello and the remaining 3 in to the left of the green jello
Now the yellow jello is fragmented, and imagine if this process continued for several years. It would become extremely messy and complicated and you can imagine how your storage would slow down because your computer would have to work that much harder to be able to locate these fragmented files.
