The Need for Secondary Storage Flashcards

All 4 cards in this deck

What is secondary storage?

Non-volatile storage used to hold data, files and programs permanently, including when the computer is switched off.

Why does a computer need secondary storage?

Because RAM is volatile and limited in size, so data and programs must be stored permanently somewhere with a large capacity.

Give two differences between primary and secondary storage.

Primary storage is much faster and directly accessible by the processor; secondary storage is slower, non-volatile and has a far larger capacity.

True or false? A program stored on a hard disk must be loaded into RAM before the processor can run it.

True. The processor works with data and instructions held in primary storage.