Memory and Storage.

Both terms are used to refer to internal storage space on a computer and that’s where the main confusion comes in. Even if you look at this article from wiki  you’ll notice that even there the very first line starts with good ambiguity by using the word “or”. The line says, “Computer data storage, often called storage or memory,…” . A snap shot is shown below, wiki might change any time! 😉 The use of “or” is questionable which we’ll explore in the subsequent reading.

Storage and Memory

 

Actually, memory, usually referred as the place where an application loads its data during processing. In Personal Computers RAM is usually referred as ‘memory’. On the other hand, a hard disk drive is usually the place where data is stored for long or short term retention and thus is known as “storage”. They are not obviously not at the same place.

Computer memory needs to be quick. It is constantly feeding the CPU with data to process. Mainframes computers have fast processors and lots of quick memory. There is a thin line between memory and Storage, when it comes to “paging” and perhaps this is where these two very different, though similar, concepts creates confusion. In the concept of ‘paging’ or “page swap” a portion of the DASD (hard disk in computer world) drive is turned into memory for the machine to swap out applications and data from memory to the disk & vice versa. This way, the DASD drive is made into memory, which, while slower than the “memory”, can be usefully used to create larger virtual memory spaces for systems.