What is difference between Memory, Ram, Storage?

Memory vs Storage

Definition

Memory vs 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, in part because both can be measured in megabytes (MB), gigabytes (GB) and terabytes (TB). This is because both memory and storage are places to hold your data, but they do very different things with it.

Random Access Memory / RAM

In common usage, the term RAM is synonymous with main memory. It is is a part of your computer that it uses while it’s powered on. Your computer stores everything that it’s thinking about in RAM. If you’re running a program, it’s in RAM. If you’re looking at a webpage, it’s in RAM. RAM contains everything that’s currently going on with your computer. And when RAM is in a computer that isn’t powered, the RAM is empty. This is where a computing system stores data that it is actively using.

Computing systems can retrieve data from RAM very quickly, but when a device powers down, all the data that was in memory goes away. Many people have had the experience of losing a document they were working on after an unexpected power outage or system crash. In these cases, the data was lost because it was stored in system memory, which is volatile.

Hard Drive / Storage

Storage refers to long-term storage. Everything that your computer knows, but isn’t thinking about, is in storage, written on the Hard Drive. This is a permanent type of storage: hard drives can be unplugged and contain the same information as when they’re plugged in or turned on. Nothing actually gets changed on the hard drive: it gets pulled off the hard drive, into RAM/Memory. While it’s in memory, you as the user can change it. When you save the information, it gets sent back to the hard drive storage in a different version.

Storage is slower, but it can retain data when the device is powered down. So, for example, if a document has been saved to a hard drive prior to a power outage or system crash, the user will still be able to retrieve it when the system is back up and running. Storage is usually less expensive than RAM on a per-gigabyte basis. As a result, most PCs and smartphones have many times more gigabytes of storage than gigabytes of RAM.