How Do Computers Store Information?
The goal is ultimately to manipulate information when you use a computer. That information, depending on what it is and how it is being used, relies on a storage medium in order to be accessed by the CPU. Those media such as a hard-drive, RAM, Video RAM and Flash memory have very different functions, depending on their performance.
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Bits and Bytes
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Computer memory does not store words or images, it stores 0s and 1s. It is that sequence of 0s and 1s that is interpreted by the computer to form the data we can see, read or with which we can interact. That memory can be either volatile or non-volatile; volatile memory needs power to retain the information, while non-volatile retains the information without power.
Hard Drive
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The hard-drive is where all the information is statically stored. It is
a non-volatile type of storage. Hard drives are the slowest storage
medium of the computer Hard drives can be of two types: Flash-based and mechanical.Mechanical hard drives make up 95% of all hard drives. The information is stored on a platter where a read/write head uses magnetic field to imprint the material with 0 or 1.
Flash based hard drives use flash memory cells to store the information.
The main advantage is that because of the absence of moving parts, the system offers more reliability and faster access time and speed. -
RAM
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Hard drives, whether flash or mechanical, are simply not able to provide
information fast enough for the CPU to work at full speed. RAM is designed to store
data the CPU needs regularly, or data used during the execution of a
specific program. The operating system stores data in RAM, while each program executes some or all of itself in RAM. RAM is a volatile type of memory.
Video RAM
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Video RAM does for the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit) what RAM does for the CPU, storing the information the GPU needs to access the fastest. In recent video cards, the Video RAM became several times faster than computer RAM in order to manage the increasingly large amount of data necessary for games and professional applications. Like RAM, Video RAM is a volatile memory.
Flash Memory
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Some operating systems support Flash as a means to improve their boot
time. Some information known to be important to the boot process are
stored in that memory, while the high speed and low access time allows the
system to boot much faster. However, the improvement depends on how fast
the hard drive is. While mechanical hard drive computers will see an
important difference, those with a Flash hard drive will usually not.
Flash memory is a non-volatile type of memory.
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