Sooner or later you will need to know the differences between memory storage and disk storage and their units of measurement.
Memory storage (more accurately known as Random Access Memory, or RAM for short) is the amount of space given to your programs to run inside. Imagine a gym building on a budget that's about half the size of conventional gym buildings. While this might be a suitable amount of space for one or two track runners, it would quickly become less than ideal environment to hold the state championships where there will be many more people and track runners. Performance is inhibited and these active participants moving about will eventually have to slow down to allow room for others to get by. This is the scenario running programs experience. The more memory there is available, the more efficiently and quickly programs will run. Similarly, if you have an ample amount of memory space, but begin to launch too many programs or try to do too many things at once, you may start to notice a decrease in performance as the room fills up, regardless if the program is running in the foreground or in the background.
However, available space in memory storage is not occupied if a program is not running. Rather, they remain dormant within your computer's disk storage, more accurately known as hard drive space. The difference here is hard drive space is intended for storing programs and files for everyday use. When installing a program, it will be installed to your hard drive.
So what is the correlation between disk (or hard drive) space and memory storage?
When launching a program, you may notice a splash screen indicating the program is loading. What is happening here is that once you've launched the program, your operating system will literally begin to load your program from where it is installed on the hard drive and into where it can be infused with kinetic energy to run in the available amount of RAM you have. When your program has been fully loaded into RAM, that is when you'll see the splash screen disappear and your program opened on the screen.
So how do we measure the amount of memory storage and disk storage on our computer?
For the most part, this information is already provided to us, either written on the hardware component itself or on the box the computer came in. In the case where you might be upgrading your RAM computer chips, it should be found on the case it came in.
Disk storage capacities are measured in bytes using the following general guidelines:
A bit is a single binary digit and is the smallest unit of measurement.There are 8 bits in 1 byte (or B for short).There are 1,024 bytes in a kilobyte (KB).There are 1,024 kilobytes in a megabyte (MB). Now obsolete, "high density" floppy disks were 1.44 MB in size.There are 1,024 megabytes in a gigabyte (GB). The most common disk storage capacity found, ranging anywhere from 120-500 GB drives.There are 1,024 gigabytes in a terabyte (TB) which are very recent and in use in homes and offices now.And finally there are 1,024 terabytes in a petabyte (PB) which you will probably never see in your life outside of Google. Probably.
To give you an idea as to how fast technology develops, in 2004 you could purchase a measly 32 MB flash drive (disk storage type) for about $35. Today you can purchase a 32,000 MB (or 32 GB) flash drive for the same price, $35.
Memory storage capacities are measured using the same units, albeit much smaller and more expensive. Common sizes range anywhere from 512 MB to 8 and 16 GB. These look nothing like hard drives or flash drives, but rather are long and skinny computer chips (we use the term loosely, "sticks" of RAM) that are plugged directly into the motherboard in any of the available RAM slots present.
Read more hardware related articles from MyNanoTech.com at http://mynanotech.com/computer-basics/hardware