your hard drive memory has 80 gigs or whatever. this is how much it can store-- your entire local library, for this analogy. Your ram is how much it can hold to work with at a given moment. This is how many books you, personally, can carry at a time. Hope that makes sense.

RAM stands for Random Access Memory, so they are both memory. There is another type of memory - ROM, or Read Only Memory.

Hard drives are a total memory that are used for storing all the files on your computer and everything you save. It all gets put in there. RAM is used when any program or process is running on your computer. Its somewhat of a measure of how many things you can have open or running at once.

They're kind of talking about the same thing. Memory would be an umbrella term, while RAM is more specific. Memory is a place to store data. It could be volatile, which means that if the power is turned off the memory is erased, or non-volatile. RAM is Random Access Memory. This is different to SAM, Sequential Access Memory. Imagine a tape recorder. To get to the middle of the tap, one needs to wind all the first section of the tape... all the way... keep winding... there. The memory is stored in a sequence, and access time is dependent upon the location of the memory upon the medium. Now imagine a RAM chip. To access a portion of memory, a certain configurations of pins are activated and, presto, there's your bit of data. Thus, my access is random and doesn't rely on the position of my previously snaffled piece of data. ROM is not exactly the opposite to RAM. ROM is Read Only Memory. Thus, we can only read it. CD-ROM are so called because the memory cannot be changed. The actual access to ROM data on a chip can be Random, further confusing the concepts! You hard drive stores information upon a metal plate using magnetic encoding, which doesn't require power to maintain it, so it is non-volatile, and the access of data is somewhere between Sequential and Random. Why? Because the data of hard drives is stored in tracks, and the harddrive itself spins to allow the reading of that track. So the accessing of a track requires the motion of a pivot arm. This means that to get from one track to another, the arm must physically move. Then, to get from one blob of data on a track to another, the disk must spin. However, it can skip tracks, which means that the accessing of the data is not purely sequential, like a record player, but it's not purely random, like a RAM chip. Lastly, there are many kinds of RAMs and ROMs and disks and tapes and other storage devices, and these all come under the category of Memory. Some fall under the heading of RAM. Wow, how much typing did I just do?

RAM is a describes a type of Memory. Just as truck describes a type of vehicle. In other words, your question could in another topic be phrased as: What is the difference between a Car and a Vehicle, I thought they were the same but I don't understand why they would have different names? Car describes the type of vehicle. RAM describes the type of memory. Don't listen to these folk who call a hard drive memory, It's not the same thing. That is called storage. Memory is "electronic circuits" from which a CPU operates a program. It's much like the scratch pad you needed back when you took the ACT and the Book could be likened to the storage device from which you read your problems and instructions and your brain (IE CPU) executed those instructions on PAPER (IE RAM). Got it, I hope so.

There are basically two types of memory: Internal = the chips inside your computer External = hard drive, CD, DVD, etc. Both can be ROM (Read only memory) internal hard wired code like most BIOS [Binary Input Output System]) external CD-ROM, Audio CD's etc. Or RAM (Random Access Memory) Internal memory banks you can change with programs, data External Harddrives, DVD-RAM etc.

Memory http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/memory RAM http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/RAM

For the layman, RAM(random access memory), is Memory. That's what people are talking about when they ask how much memory you have, or that you need to buy more memory. The memory chips that you would buy are RAM.