1

I have two sticks of RAM in my computer that I would like to sell or donate. From what I understand some RAM is volatile, losing all its contents when power is gone for a few minutes, and some is non-volatile, retaining that information after power is lost. I would like to know which kind of RAM I have and whether it is safe to give it to someone else.

I am not very tech savvy, all I know about the sticks is that the manufacturer is Kingston, and when I open Task Manager it says that it is "DDR3" and the form factor is "DIMM".

Thanks in advance.

Improve this question
0

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
2

Regular consumer computer RAM is always volatile.
The confusion comes from other types of RAM… NVRAM, for instance, which is not volatile.

Consumer computers will invariably use volatile DRAM. Anything your computer uses in those DDR3 RAM slots is definitely volatile. Any data will be gone beyond recovery almost before the computer's fans have stopped spinning at shutdown.

There's a mind-numbing description of all available types on Wikipedia - Random-access memory, but to all intents & purposes, your regular home computer RAM is always volatile.

Improve this answer