Computer Skills Course: Hard Drives and RAM

let's talk about hard drives and RAM these are two very important components inside of a computer and confused with one another so let's see if we can clarify the difference and understand the purpose of each one to start in very general terms hard drives let your computer hold more stuff things like music photos videos applications etc RAM on the other hand basically just makes your computer go faster that's the simple version to understand in a bit more detail let's use an analogy let's say your computer is a workshop and the CPU which is the central processing unit is the woodworker to do any kind of work he's going to need tools and supplies and he's going to need some shelves to store all these tools and supplies the shelves in a computer are like the hard drive they provide lots of space to hold all sorts of items that he's going to want to use in order to use them though he has to take them off of the shelf and he needs a place to put them where they'll be right at his fingertips for easy access and immediate use he needs a workbench this workbench in the case of a computer is RAM which stands for random access memory it provides a temporary place to store data while the CPU is working on it so whenever you're working on something on a computer whether it's editing a text document in a word processor or touching up a photo in an image editor that item is first loaded into Ram it's the computer's workbench if your computer doesn't have very much RAM it's like having a very small work bench if this is the case it really doesn't matter how skilled the worker is he won't be able to work very quickly because he'll constantly be making trips back and forth from the shelves to get the items he needs to work on the other hand if your computer has a lot of RAM it's like having a great big workbench the worker can put everything he needs on it and won't have to make any trips to the shelf it's important to know that items cannot be permanently stored in RAM in fact Ram is wiped clean as soon as the computer is turned off so that's why it's important to save your documents which is the equivalent of taking them from the workbench and putting them back on the shelves for storage now the amount of RAM you will need to work efficiently depends on the type of work that you're doing if you're mostly just using a word processor you don't need a whole lot of RAM but if you're editing large images or editing high resolution video you'll need quite a bit of RAM in order to work efficiently let's take a quick look now at some specific amounts of RAM and hard drive capacity so that you have an idea of what is a little what is a lot and how this has changed over time if we look back to the mid-1990s a typical computer had on average about one gigabyte of hard drive space and about eight megabytes of RAM 20 years later those numbers had grown roughly 1,000 fold so a typical computer in 2015 included about one terabyte of hard drive space and about eight gigabytes of RAM on top of that the power of a typical CPU which is the main processor chip in a computer had also increased by about 1,000 fold interestingly one area that hasn't increased by such a great margin is the speed of hard drives even though their storage has increased by a thousandfold they can only read and write data about 30 times faster today than they could 20 years ago it's actually this slow read and write speed of hard drives that most handicaps the performance of modern computers fortunately there's a new technology that has emerged as a replacement for hard drives it's called a solid-state drive often abbreviated as SSD it's called solid-state because unlike a hard drive it has no moving parts these solid-state drives are able to read and write data about 10 times faster than hard drives so replacing your hard drive with an SSD will give your computer a massive performance boost that concludes this video I hope you've enjoyed it and that you have a better understanding of hard drives SSDs and RAM

Channel: Dane Hartman

Views: 42,388

Keywords: Computer Courses, Computer Skills, Computer Basics, Computer Classes, Computer Training, Beginner Computer, Computer Education, Computer Lessons, Computer Tutorials, Computer Curriculum, Technology Education, Technology Curriculum, RAM, SSD, Hard drive, RAM definition, SSD Hard Drive, What is SSD, What is a Hard Drive, What is the RAM, Computer Memory Explained, Explain Computer Memory, Computer Components Explained, RAM explained, Animation, Animated, What is RAM

Id: kjD5OUroAh4

Length: 4min 51sec (291 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 14 2016