RAM vs. Storage

 One of the most confusing sets of terms in everyday computer usage is “‘Memory’ & ‘Storage’.” People often use one term when they mean to refer to the other thing. It can be confusing because both memory and storage are measured in the same units: bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, etc. This is because both memory and storage are places to hold your data, but they do very different things with it. Sometimes people who are not professional in computer can’t figure out the differences between memory and storage. They often mix one with the other, and call the device storing data as memory or main memory.

Perhaps the most common challenge computer users encounter when using a computer involves memory, or the lack thereof in their computer. Computer support technicians will tell you that computer users are often unclear on the different types of memory in their computer. Users often interchange memory with storage, and vice-versa. Statements like “I have eight gigabytes of disk,” or “I have one terabyte of memory” tell computer support people that they’re dealing with a novice when it comes to computer terminology. We don’t want you to appear as a novice, so let’s break the concepts down and examine these two parts of your computer, how they work together, and how they affect your computer’s performance.

The Difference Between Memory and Storage

Your computer’s main memory is called RAM. You can think of it as a workspace the computer uses to get work done. When you double-click on an app, or open a document, or, well, do much of anything, RAM gets used to store that data while the computer is working on it. Modern computers often come equipped with 4, 8, 16 or more gigabytes of RAM pre-installed.

There’s also storage: a hard disk drive or solid state drive where data is recorded and can stay indefinitely, to be recalled as necessary. That might be a tax return, a poem in a word processor, or an email. By comparison, RAM is volatile the information that’s put in there disappears when the power is turned off or when the computer is reset. Stuff written to disk stays there permanently until it’s erased, or until the storage medium fails

What is RAM?

RAM takes the form of computer chips integrated circuits that are either soldered directly onto the main logic board of your computer or installed in memory modules that go in sockets on your computer’s logic board.

RAM stands for Random Access Memory. The data stored in RAM can be accessed almost instantly regardless of where in memory it is stored, so it’s very fast milliseconds fast. RAM has a very fast path to the computer’s CPU, or central processing unit, the brain of the computer that does most of the work.

RAM is random access as opposed to sequential access. Data that’s accessed sequentially includes stuff that’s written to your hard disk drive, for example. It’s commonly written in files, with a specific start location and end location. We’ll get to your hard drive storage in a moment.

If you have general purpose needs for your computer, you probably don’t need to tweak its RAM very much. In fact, depending on what computer you buy, you may very well not be able to change the RAM. Apple and others have removed RAM upgradability from some of their lower-end or portable computers, for example.

If your computer is older and upgradable, putting in more RAM helps it load and use more apps, more documents, and larger files without slowing down and having to swap that data to disk, which we will cover below.

If you work with very large files big databases for example, or big image files or video, or if the apps you work with require a large amount of memory to process their data, having more RAM in your computer can help performance significantly.

What is Computer Storage?

Computers need some form of non-volatile storage. That’s a place data can stay even when the computer isn’t being used and is turned off, so you don’t have to reload and re-enter everything each time you use the computer. That’s the point of having storage in addition to RAM.

Storage for the vast majority of computers in use today consists of a drive, either a hard drive or a solid state drive. Drives can provide a lot of space that can be used to store applications, documents, data and all the other stuff you need to get your work done and your computer needs to operate.

No matter what type of drive you have, storage is almost always slower than RAM. Hard disk drives are mechanical devices, so they can’t access information nearly as quickly as memory does. And storage devices in most personal computers use an interface called Serial ATA (SATA), which affects the speed at which data can move between the drive and the CPU.

So why use hard drives at all? Well, they’re cheap and available.

In recent years, more computer makers have begun to offer Solid State Drives (SSDs) as a storage option, in place of or in addition to a conventional hard disk drive.

SSDs are much faster than hard drives since they use integrated circuits. SSDs use a special type of memory circuitry called non-volatile RAM (NVRAM) to store data, so everything stays in place even when the computer is turned off.

Even though SSDs use memory chips instead of a mechanical platter that has to be read sequentially, they’re still slower than the computer’s RAM. That’s partly because of the performance of the memory chips that are being used, and partly also because of the bottleneck created by the interface that connects the storage device to the computer – it’s not nearly as fast as the interface RAM uses.