Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Finding Alternatives To The Hard Disk Drive For Virtual Memory, Bruce Albert Embry

Theses and Dissertations

Current computer systems fill the demand of operating systems and applications for ever greater amounts of random access memory by paging the least recently used data to the hard disk drive. This paging process is called "virtual memory," to indicate that the hard disk drive is used to create the illusion that the computer has more random access memory than it actually has. Unfortunately, the fastest hard disk drives are over five orders of magnitude slower than the DRAM they are emulating. When the demand for memory increases to the point that processes are being continually saved to disk and …