Primary Storage Vs Secondary Storage: What’s The Difference?

Introduction

Data storage is an important function that computer plays daily. The concept of storage is defined by the hierarchy of four levels: primary, secondary, tertiary, and offline.

You must be familiar with primary and secondary storage, but do you really know about them? So, let’s begin with the difference between the two.

What Is Memory?

Before starting with the difference between primary and secondary storage, you must revise a little bit about memory.
It can be understood similarly to the brain and is used to store data with instructions. The memory of a computer is a storage space where data is to be processed, and instructions are to be processed.

It is divided into a large number of portions, which are called cells. Moreover, every cell/portion has its unique address and size. Two categories of memory are:

• Primary Memory
• Secondary Memory

Data storage is a very common term for achieving or transferring information in a storage medium

What Is Primary Memory?

It is also known as the main memory of the computer. While using this kind of memory, it is easy to access data because it is an internal memory of the computer.

Furthermore, primary memory is volatile, which means data in this memory does not exist if it is not saved when a power failure occurs. Also, it is expensive than secondary memory and is a semiconductor.

The types are

• RAM: It is the main memory of the computer and generally contains temporary or cache memory.
• ROM: It is a permanent type of memory and the content is not lost when the power supply is switched off.
• Cache Memory: It is generally joined to the motherboard and provides quicker access by storing an instance of the programs or data regular accessed by the processor.

What Is Secondary Memory?

This kind of memory is capable of storing high-volume data and is comparatively slower than primary memory. However, it can save a substantial amount of data in the range of gigabytes and terabytes.

Types of secondary memory

• Flash/SSD

It is known as a solid-state drive, which provides a persistent flash memory. It is comparatively faster as compared to Hard Drives.

• Optical drives

The following comes under this category:

• CD
• DVD
• Blueray
• USB drives

These are some of the popular types of secondary memories that are available in the market. They are removable and physically very small. Over the time, their capacity has increased.

Difference Between The Traits Of Primary And Secondary Memory

Primary memory

• You cannot run a computer without primary memory.
• Known as the main memory.
• Data can be lost if the power supply is lost.
• It is also known as the working memory of a computer.

Secondary memory

• Its types are known to be magnetic and optical memories.
• This memory is also known as the secondary memory.
• The data remains stored, unlike primary memory.
• You can run your computer without secondary memory.

Differences on the Basis of Following Parameters

We are going to find the difference between the two on the basis of the following parameters.

1. Nature

The nature of primary memory is categorized as volatile and non-volatile memories. In contrast, the secondary memory is always a non-volatile memory.

2. Storage

Primary memory holds the data or information that is currently being used by the processing unit. The capacity ranges from 16 to 32 GB.

Secondary memory can store a substantial amount of data and information. The capacity generally goes from 200GB to terabytes.

3. Access and expense

Primary data can be accessed with the help of a data bus and is costlier than secondary data.

Secondary memory is that kind of memory that can be accessed by I/O channels. When it comes to price, this kind of memory is cheaper.

Key Differences Between Primary and Secondary Memories

• Primary memory is called internal memory, whereas secondary memory is known as a backup or auxiliary memory.
• These memories have different access points. Primary memory requires a data bus and secondary memory requires I/O channels.
• A processing unit can access primary memory directly, and the situation is completely opposite to secondary memory.
• One of the major differences between the two is price. Secondary memory is cheaper and primary memory is quite expensive.

Concluding Words

Primary and secondary storages are an integral aspect of storage strategy. The former provides easy and quick access with efficient access to resources.

The latter provides long-term security of data with a long-term retention solution for the swarm of documents, photos, videos that we accumulate on a daily basis.

We take them for granted sometimes, but they do play an important role in our daily work. We hope things have got clear in your head.

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