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 multiple meaning of storage.
RAM would be primary storage, directly accessible from the CPU and fast. Most primary storage today is volatile which mean the information is lost when not powered
A hard drive or an SSD would be secondary storage, it is not directly accessible by the CPU data need to be copied to primary storage. It is a lot slower than the primary storage but also cheaper so you can have more of it. Secondary storage is also non-volatile so information is retained without constant electrical power.
Offline storage is any type you can remove like a CD, USB memory, SD card etc IT requires a human to connect it.
There is tertiary storage too, which would be removable storage with a robotic mechanism like a tape library. This is not consumer produce but are used by companies.
Storage can mean just a single type or a combination of types depending on context and person. I would never call RAM just storage, I would only use of for secondary storage and below that but it is not uncommon that people use the word storage for RAM.
So the statement “the computer has run of storage” can have multiple meanings and it is hard to know which is used.
A computer gets slow when the program needs more RAM than is available. You can use secondary storage as fake ram often called virtual memory. The problem is the speed will be slower by a factor of 100-1000 times. This is likely what you talk about.
It is just not that the program needs more RAM. The operation system will recently access files on the secondary storage in RAM so you can read and write to them faster. If programs use up all RAM there is no left for this disk cache and it has to be written to and from the secondary storage all the time. It is not just Secondary storage that is faced like that. Programs that access data after the internet can user RAM to cache that data too.
The ram requirement then increases with new updates of suotware. This is because more features are usually added and the programmers assume people have more RAM. If you do use more RAM you can make stuff fast for some applications.
So update so software, will both the operation system and software you install usually increase RAM usage- More and more programs tend to be installed over time too. Lots of them have parts that are always on this alos increases RAM usage
The best upgrade of a computer that has become slow today is to get more RAM and to upgrade the disk the operation system is on to an SSD. CPU performance has not increased that much in the last decade. So enough RAM and an SSD instead of an HDD make a huge difference. It is likely not enough to play the latest game but for more everyday usage that in large part will be web browsers that require a lot of RAM today the difference or computers made today is not that large.
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