Julia Kagan is a financial/consumer journalist and former senior editor, personal finance, of Investopedia. Somer G. Anderson is CPA, doctor of accounting, and an accounting and finance professor who ...

The transfer of data from memory (RAM) to storage. Whenever a document is saved, the program writes the contents of a reserved area of RAM (the buffer) to the hard drive or solid state drive (SSD).

A reserved section of memory for incoming video frames. A video buffer is used to maintain smooth, continuous viewing when the content is coming from a network. See buffering and adaptive streaming.