Memory vs Hard Drive

[jr188181]

what is the diference between them?
does one run the other or are they the same thing with diffferent names?

 

[jaquith]

Welcome to Tom's Forum!

RAM is volatile and the Hard Drive is not volatile; meaning if you lose power the data stored on the HDD/SSD is still there, but all of the data stored in RAM is gone for good. Therefore, your Documents, OS, etc are all stored on non-volatile media. RAM is used of the temporary storage for data being processed by the CPU, and written or read from the HDD/SSD as needed.

RAM is considerably faster than any HDD {Hard Disk Drive} or current SSD {Solid State Drive}. RAM per Gigabyte {GB 1,000,000,000 bytes} of storage is many times more expensive than even SSD, and SSD is more expensive per GB than HDD storage.

RAM - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random-access_memory
HDD - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_drive
SSD - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive