I’m trying to understand this so I can get on with learning for school and buying my own PC components but I’m having a really hard time understanding why these are both the same but different. Please help.
In: Technology
RAM is high speed and volatile. You can write to it constantly but it doesn’t persist when it loses power.
SD cards are slower persistent storage built on different technology.
Ram is for temporary storage an SD card would be used for longer term storage. They’re for different things
RAM is memory for what your computer is doing *right now*. Programs it’s running, things it’s using at this moment.
Card storage is stuff it may access later.
It’s like how, right now, you’re only thinking about a very tiny fraction of *all* the things you have ever seen.
Piggy backing off the other comments, lets imagine memory as a table
Lets say you’re carrying a package and just need to put it down for a second to rest. You dont need a big table for that. Dont even need to use alot of space on that table; you just put it on the corner for a moment, then you’ll pick it up and be on your way again.
Now lets imagine you’re going to a big party and you need to leave the package on the table over the course of the party, along with dozens of other packages. You’ll probably want alot more table space because the table needs to hold ALOT more packages over a longer period of time.
This is the difference between RAM and SD cards. RAM doesnt hold memory for long and it gets rewritten quickly, so it doesnt usually need to hold onto big things for very long. SD Cards hold onto memory for as long as you need it so you might need more memory if you want to store more or bigger things.
Ram is like a highway. People travel to and from places all day on the road. Meanwhile an sd card is like the neighborhood those cars are from. They have to sit there and aren’t always being used. Some of those cars get used only once or twice a month or less. But they still need space for them.
That’s why you don’t need as much ram, because one is for transit, meanwhile the other is for long time storage.
I think you are mixing up about SD cards. SD cards are usually used with phones. It is removable.
PCs use SSDs or HDs. Solid State Drives or Hard Drives. These can also be removable(external). But, they are usually physically bigger and hold more data.
SSDs are faster and more expensive than HDs. Trends are moving toward SSDs. I use an SSD for games and my OS. I use HDs for data.
RAM holds what is NOW being run. SSDs/HDs hold all your data. If you turn off the computer, the RAM no longer holds data.
An example of the difference is games.
People probably only play one game at a time, It is run in RAM.
All one’s games are installed on an SSD/HD. The OS is on the SSD/HD. Any data you want to keep there is stored on HDs/SSDs.
Ram is like the work table and loading dock for your computer. The warehouse (hard drive) can be enormous, the only information that needs to be stored on it is the stuff you’re immediately working on
RAM is working memory – how much information you can keep in your head while trying to solve a complex problem before needing to stop and write things down.
SD cards and other “hard” storage is permanent memory – how to do arithmetic, multiplication tables, formulas, along with your grandparents’ phone number, childhood address, and the lyrics to dozens of songs. If you could only remember as little as you can hold in your head at one time you wouldn’t be able to do much at all.
So RAM lets your computer think really fast. Your hard drive / SSD lets it store files and software.
Imagine you have a desk, and a filing cabinet. Your filing cabinet holds hundreds of organized documents, but getting something out of it takes time. Therefore, you only get a handful of necessary documents out of the filing cabinet at a time and work on them at your desk, where you have much faster access to them. When you’re done or when your desk gets too full, you put away the ones you don’t need, and at the end of the day you put everything away before you go home.
An SD card, Hard Drive, or SSD are like the filing cabinet. They’re meant for long-term storage, and are somewhat slow to access. RAM on the other hand, stores what the computer is working on right now (open documents, the results of calculations made by running programs, etc.) and is therefore designed to be fast in ways the long-term storage isn’t. RAM also needs power to store things, so when the computer is turned off, RAM loses all it’s data.
RAM is much faster, but also physically larger and more expensive.
Think of RAM like desk space, while an SD card is like a book. The book can’t show you as much information at once, but all the pages in the book could cover the desk many times over.
16GB of RAM isn’t particularly big these days, that’s around $40 of memory. I’d put at least that much in any machine that’s doing more than light web browsing. I have that much memory, and I do run out of it about somewhat frequently.
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