Its relevant because its primary use doesnt change how the memory is accessed. The only reason NVRAM doesnt see use as primary system ram is that they are much slower and many types have limited write cycles making them unsuitable for the job.
In the context of setting up a PC a SSD is a drive, not RAM. You couldn’t pull out your RAM DIMMs and just run on your NVME/SATA SSD as RAM instead (unless your CPU/MB support that which to my knowledge isn’t common). I’m not saying that flash memory isn’t random access memory in the general sense of the word, I’m saying that when talking about a PC specifically RAM refers to special memory the motherboard makes directly available to the CPU, and a SSD isn’t that.
No I’m going to tell you that is still irrelevant. The OP said:
I’ve had one that thought that “SSD” was a kind of RAM, and insisted on installing Windows on a hard drive.
It seems the student thought a SSD is RAM in the sense of “volatile CPU storage” and thus unfit for an OS install. And a SSD is not RAM in that sense of the word.
Its relevant because its primary use doesnt change how the memory is accessed. The only reason NVRAM doesnt see use as primary system ram is that they are much slower and many types have limited write cycles making them unsuitable for the job.
In the context of setting up a PC a SSD is a drive, not RAM. You couldn’t pull out your RAM DIMMs and just run on your NVME/SATA SSD as RAM instead (unless your CPU/MB support that which to my knowledge isn’t common). I’m not saying that flash memory isn’t random access memory in the general sense of the word, I’m saying that when talking about a PC specifically RAM refers to special memory the motherboard makes directly available to the CPU, and a SSD isn’t that.
Next you’re going to tell me Apple Macs are not PCs.
No I’m going to tell you that is still irrelevant. The OP said:
It seems the student thought a SSD is RAM in the sense of “volatile CPU storage” and thus unfit for an OS install. And a SSD is not RAM in that sense of the word.