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Information Storage

According to Dix et al., computers basically provide two means of storing information (79-86):

• short-term memory, called Random Access Memory (RAM)³¹
• long-term memory, usually hard disks, floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and others.

RAM can be accessed very quickly and comes in sizes from a few kilobytes to several gigabytes. In general, it loses all its information when the power is turned off (79). Long-term memory, such as hard disks, is slower, but does usually store more information than RAM. Information on a hard disk or a floppy drive can be modified, whereas most CD-ROMs are read-only (80).

Hard disks can be used for virtual memory, which means that if there is not enough RAM, the hard disk is used in order to store a part of the RAM content on the disk drive (Tanenbaum 89).

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