Memory Versus Storage

One of the eas­i­est and cheap­est ways to improve your computer’s per­for­mance is to add mem­ory. What I’ve found, though, is that peo­ple con­sis­tently have no idea what mem­ory is. A lot of peo­ple con­fuse their hard drive (or other stor­age devices) with mem­ory (or ram). They are vastly dif­fer­ent; get­ting a big­ger hard drive rarely does any­thing to increase sys­tem performance.

Let’s take a look at what mem­ory is, what stor­age space is, and why adding mem­ory just might make your com­puter stop run­ning like a con­sti­pated elephant.

Mem­ory

Every­thing gets a bit com­pli­cated when we start talk­ing about cell phones, PDA’s, and MP3 play­ers, tablets, and the like so for right now we’ll just stick to lap­tops and desk­tops. Your com­puter, much like you, has the abil­ity to remem­ber things. Most peo­ple have the abil­ity to quickly recall facts to from mem­ory and spit them out their mouth. For exam­ple, if I were to ask you who the pres­i­dent of the United States is, you’d quickly be able to tell me that it’s Bar­rack Obama. You’d have no need to go and look it up.

Mem­ory in a com­puter is sim­i­lar. “Mem­ory” is a short­ened term we use for Ran­dom Access Mem­ory (or “ram”). It’s a place the com­puter can put things to later access very quickly. The biggest dif­fer­ence between a computer’s mem­ory and your mem­ory is that a computer’s mem­ory needs to be con­stantly pow­ered in order to hold any­thing. That means when you turn off your com­puter, what­ever is in your computer’s mem­ory dis­ap­pears. That’s one rea­son that you need some­thing more than mem­ory; you need storage.

Stor­age

Stor­age is a bit like a book shelf. You can’t remem­ber every­thing even if you have a good mem­ory. Some­times you’ll write things down in a book, or some­times you’ll keep books writ­ten by other peo­ple around for ref­er­ence. Before Wikipedia, if I were to ask you when pre­cisely Allied forces invaded Nor­mandy, you’d prob­a­bly go to your book­shelf and pull out an ency­clo­pe­dia or an his­tory text­book. Obvi­ously this method is slower than just remem­ber­ing the date off the top of your head, but at least you’ve got access to the information.

Since your com­puter for­gets every­thing in mem­ory every time you turn it off, it stores every­thing on stor­age devices. This is usu­ally a com­puter hard drive, but now a lot of com­put­ers use solid state dri­ves. You’ve prob­a­bly also used a USB flash drive and you may have used an online stor­age site like Drop­box. All of these meth­ods are basi­cally the same. They hold the infor­ma­tion per­ma­nently (as long as the drive remains undam­aged), but they take longer to access than memory.

Again, it’s just like a book or a library. A library can hold far more infor­ma­tion than your brain ever could but it takes a bit to access it. Sim­i­larly, your aver­age com­puter has about 4 giga­bytes (gb) of mem­ory but your aver­age hard drive holds upwards of 500gb.

Mem­ory and Performance

If it isn’t already obvi­ous, the more mem­ory you have the more your com­puter can remem­ber with­out hav­ing to go to its library (stor­age device). Right now, depend­ing on how much you use your com­puter, I’d sug­gest hav­ing 2–4gb of mem­ory. I find that I can run Chrome, Spo­tify, and Pho­to­shop com­fort­ably with 2gb. I usu­ally like to run a few more pro­grams than that so I just ordered a stick to bring me up to 3gb. My desk­top com­puter has 8gb and I use that much all the time because of video editing.

Quick Note

Dif­fer­ent kinds of com­put­ers take dif­fer­ent kinds of mem­ory. Check into what kind of mem­ory your com­puter uses with your com­puter man­u­fac­turer. In the future, I may write a post on how to find out what kind of mem­ory you use. Also: if you just want to know how much mem­ory you have, click the win­dows logo at the bot­tom right of your screen, right click on “Com­puter” (or “My Com­puter” in Win­dows XP), and click prop­er­ties. You should see a list of infor­ma­tion and one of them will say some­thing like “Installed mem­ory (ram).” What­ever num­ber you get there is how much mem­ory you have.

2gb is a good num­ber for Win­dows XP and it’s not bad for Win­dows 7. I’d say 4gb is a must for Win­dows Vista and some­thing I’d rec­om­mend get­ting for Win­dows 7 if you have the bud­get for it.