I was at work and some computers that were nearly maxed on storage were basically unusable. This doesn’t make sense because my understanding was RAM was the storage the computer uses to run tasks and the storage was for things downloaded
My guess would be that the storage is used for ‘long term’ RAM, something that will be needed for a while anyways but idk. Outside of that I can’t really think of anything else
In: 10
Things stored in ram come from somewhere, and those things are often served up from the computer’s storage drives. Desktop backgrounds, text programs, web browsers, etc. Running things also frequently saves items to hard drives, such as when you download a picture. If your storage drives are slow, even if you have enough RAM, you’ll see speed issues.
If your computers are using Hard drives, slowdowns can be caused by fragmentation. Hard drives are divided into physical magnetic disks that are read by a moving arm. As you create and delete files on the drive, free areas left over may not be the right size for all new files. Files can then be split over multiple smaller sectors, but since an arm needs to physically move and the disks need to spin, fragmented files take longer to read and write as they’re not right next to each other physically. Defragmentation can fix this, as files are moved around to be contiguous again.
If your computers are using SSD’s, though they’re quite fast, a nearly-full SSD still has problems. As the bits within an SSD can be worn down over time, files are written in such a way that every bit is used at the same rate, basically one after the other in sequence. If a new file cannot fit contiguously in the next sequence of bits, data is copied forward so that the new file can fit. As an SSD fills, it becomes less likely that there is a contiguous area of the SSD large enough for new files, so the Garbage Collector must move data around much more often, which can cause noticeable slowdowns at ~20% free space or less.
Latest Answers