Memory / Storage

At least once a day I'll hear someone say something about a computer that makes them sound stupid. As much as I want to, I don't just correct them then and there. This is because it's difficult to do so without:

• Sounding like a geek
• Confusing them and having to explain it 4 times
• The possibility that they think you're an arsehole
• Them going away thinking you give a shit

"I've got too much music on my laptop, I'll have to buy more memory!"
-The last such statement I challenged


As difficult as it is to cope with two commodities being measured in the same units, I'm sure that since many manage it for money and weight, memory and storage shouldn't be too much of a stretch!


Admittedly, "memory" is a bit of an ambiguous word in computing and technically storage is a type of memory but the girl who I'm quoting above did not know that, so that doesn't excuse her mistake!


I'm here now, so this is the technical bit...
The difference is the volatility- i.e. "will it still be there when i switch it off and on again?"


Non-volatile memory- the kind that stores it's contents when the power goes out is storage. Everything that you can save then bring back later goes on some kind of non-volatile memory, such as hard drives, CD's, tapes, menory cards and flash drives.


Volatile memory (RAM) is the kind that it's acceptable to simply call memory. It is volatile because it loses its contents when there is no power connected. This makes it pretty useless for storing files that you want to keep! It's much quicker than storage and is only used to store programs and files while they're in use. So a program is stored in storage, copied to memory to be used and then removed from memory when you close it.


As I told the girl who thought she needed more memory, buying more memory wouldn't let you store have any more files on the computer. Replacing the hard drive with a bigger one, or adding another would be the way to get more space for music. Adding memory allows for more programs to run simultaneously without things slowing to a halt when you switch between them.