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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RAM is short for random access memory, it’s very fast, but the contents go away when the power is cut. It’s temporary.
The hard drive, or more common now, solid-state drive is permanent storage that holds your files, programs, and the operating system.
This storage is much slower than the RAM, so you want to load from it only when needed for performance reasons.
When the system runs out of RAM, it will use what is called a swap, or page file. This is stored on the hard drive or solid-state drive, and it allows the operating system to swap out idle parts of RAM to that file, recalling it when needed.
This is generally done as a last resort because of how much slower permanent storage is compared to RAM.
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