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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In addition to what others have said: RAM is temporary storage. Data in RAM goes away if the computer crashes, power fails, a program aborts, etc. Storage systems, whether they use HDDs or SSDs, are designed to store far more data, and to keep it around for as long as you want.
However, while fast, storage systems are not infinitely fast. Suppose you are running a job to process payroll. Every employee’s data has to be accessed. Payroll records have to be written to storage where they will last. But the amount of actually computing on that data is pretty small. So this job’s speed will likely be limited by how fast the employee time-card data can be read from storage and how fast the payroll records can be written to storage.
Even if the total amount of data you need to process is small enough that it could be in RAM, that isn’t where the data is, and the process of reading it into RAM will take some amount of time.
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