Build an Awesome PC, 2014 Edition

Chapter 4Memory and Storage

With the hardest part of building your PC completed, the remainder of the assembly is simply a matter of putting a few more parts together. But although doing this is easy, deciding which parts to use is where the challenge comes in. We are committed to building an awesome PC, so we need excellent components to complete our objective.

A key performance indicator in a computer, besides the speed of the CPU, is how quickly data can be fetched to move in and out of the CPU. The computer relies on storage to keep track of short- and long-term data. Short-term data is stored in random-access memory (RAM) while longer-term data (data that needs to survive after a system shuts down, for example) is stored on fixed media ...