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
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There are 3 different levels of memory for your PC to use.
The Main Storage (Hard Drive or SSD) which holds data even when the computer is off. Depending on the medium, motherboard…this can range from very slow to not that slow and can hold as much as you want depending on how many drives you have.
The secondary Intermediate storage is your RAM. It only holds data when the computer is on, and applications access RAM when it knows the data it needs has already been loaded there. If it’s not there, the data is pulled from the HD and placed there for convenient use. This ranges from pretty dang fast to REALLY pretty dang fast. This can range from not enough to a n awful lot depending on your motherboard and RAM choice.
Finally, you have the cache. This is data that the CPU needs NOW and is in fact where data from RAM goes when the CPU accesses it. It memory stored directly on the CPU and is so fast it’s effectively instantaneous (compared to the other mediums). The issue is it isn’t very large and even the cache has several levels, with each level being faster, but smaller.
The way your HD or SSD effects performance is when a program is constantly having to access data that is NOT in RAM. Files your application is making/editing for example, databases, things like that will all remain in the main storage and thus slow things down.
The coding of applications can make things faster/slower. For example in most programming languages, arrays of thinks like integers/strings/floats can be directly stored in the cache in what’s called the heap. If programmed to use this, an application can have extremely fast data-access times.
It’s more complicated to program though so many applications do not overly focus on optimizingb performance to that level however.
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