Persistence

The third major theme of the course is persistence. In system memory, data can be easily lost, as devices such as DRAM store values in a volatile manner; when the power goes away or the system crashes, any data in memory is lost. Thus, we need hardware and software to be able to store data persistently; such storage is thus critical to any system as users care a great deal about their data.

The hardware comes in the form of some kind of input/output or I/O device; in modern systems, a hard drive is a common repository for long-lived information, although solid-state drives (SSDs) are making headway in this arena as well.

The software in the operating system ...