Memcached vs. static pages

[Daniel Rhoden]

Hopefully this is a simple question to answer.  Is there any  
performance benefit of going to the trouble of setting up memcached  
for static pages?  I guess the question is, does nginx have its own  
form of storing frequently requested static resources, or does it read  
from the hard drive each time is serves those requests?

My gut tells me nginx has something already built in to optimize  
requests for static pages without the complexity of memcached.

Thanks community!

--Daniel Rhoden