| What is a home computer? Part 2 |
 The next hardware device we find in a computer is its memory. There are 2 main categories: memory that looses its data when the power is turned (Volatile) and memory that keeps its data when the computer is turned off (Nonvolatile).
• Nonvolatile memory: the best example is a hard drive. When the computer saves data to a hard drive, it stays there unless you manually remove it. Other examples are: floppy disks, CD-ROMs, DVD-ROMs and USB storage devices.
• Volatile memory: the best example is RAM memory. RAM is short for Random Access Memory.
Many will probably ask: why use volatile memory, if data is lost when the power is turned off? The answer is simple, saving every piece of data to the hard drive, takes a lot of time. Communication between volatile memory and the processor is so much faster than with a hard drive.
When you start your computer and the programs you will use, the processor will write parts of the program to the computer's RAM. The drawback of RAM memory is its cost. RAM is expensive; hence you can't put large amounts of it in your computer. However, today's RAM is much cheaper and more powerful than 5 years ago. In addition to that, even large amounts of RAM in your computer, wouldn't be able to store all temporary data when opening and working in many different programs. Other volatile memory is used in computers like cache and virtual memory. More on those memories in other articles.
More computer hardware will be explained in the next articles. See part 3 for video cards.
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