Unlike an office desk, however, RAM cannot act as permanent storage. Just as having a bigger desk can hold more bits of paper on it without becoming messy and unwieldy (as well as requiring more trips back to the filing cabinet to reorganize). The more RAM you have, the more things you can have quick access to at any one time. The RAM is like an entire office workstation, while the CPU cache is like the actual working area where you actively work on a document. The hard drive is the filing cabinet in the corner. Your system uses RAM to store working parts of the operating system temporarily and the data your applications are using actively. It acts as a middle ground between the small, super-fast cache in your CPU and the large, super-slow storage of your hard drive or solid-state drive (SSD). Read on for explanations on the different kinds of RAM, how to read RAM specifications, and exactly how RAM works.
