RAM stands for Random Access Memory. It’s used for short term purposes, to ‘hold information’ in a way that is fast, but not long term. Sometimes a good way to understand something is to oppose it. RAM memory is different than ‘hard drive memory’ in that our hard drive is like our long term memories. They can be hard to draw up and hard to remember. To read more, see our What is RAM page.

When someone says “SDRAM” they might mean one of two things. It could be be referring to SDR SDRAM (also known as legacy SDRAM) or DDR SDRAM - SDR SDRAM, like it’s younger cousin DDR SDRAM and even the most modern version DDR5, are a type of computer memory know as DRAM. To read more, see our DDR SD RAM vs Legacy SD RAM page.

DDR SDRAM came out for the first time in 1997 and was produced by Samsung Corporation. One of the big changes though when DDR came out with the specification of DIMM and SODIMM chip types, for desktops and laptops respectively. To read more see our the types of DDR RAM.