There are a few common misconceptions surrounding these two items and how they both relate to your computer as a whole.
Computer Tower
Hard Drive
First up, a Hard Drive isn’t another name for your computer. A Hard Drive is a component that goes inside your computer, it’s not the computer itself.
Also a Hard Drive isn’t the same as RAM, or vice versa. Your Hard Drive acts much like our brain’s long term memory in that it provides permanent storage.
RAM on the other hand is a completely different kind of beast.
RAM
Since it’s a temporary memory, when the system is shut down the memory is lost (this is called volatile memory). This makes RAM much like the short term memory of our brain.
Every application and every document you load up on your computer is loaded into RAM first before your computer starts its work.
When you open that Word document on your desktop or in an email, both Word and the document are loaded into RAM. When you have very little RAM you can see how things can start to slow down due to the amount of things being loaded into RAM for your computer to access.
This brings me to the next aspect of RAM. Sometimes you might need more memory than what the RAM installed can offer during intensive application cycles. During these sessions, the computer will conduct a task known as swapping. This is when the computer temporarily uses the hard drive space in place of the memory. ”Thrashing” is the term for constantly swapping, but as the name’s connotation suggests, constant thrashing can decrease the overall system performance. More RAM being added can reduce the swapping rate.
A quick way to remember the difference would be :-
- RAM = Fast & Temporary
- Hard Drive = Slow & Permanent
Like all things technological, lines start to become blurred as new technology incorporates the best of old technology. This is where SSDs come in, but I think I’ll leave that one for now.
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Fab little piece, Paul! Really informative and easy to understand. Kudos on translating into lay-man's terms what is probably, for many people, a minefield of language and confusion.
Well done Paul! Even us IT simpletons are beginning to understand the mysteries surrounding the personal computer. Anyone else got any questions? Ask Paul. An IT guy who actually speaks our lingo! Amazing!