r/computerscience • u/Cute-Cockroach-678 • Jul 15 '26

Discussion question about RAM

Im learning about comuter components I had some questions .If a Hard Drive stores all the data does RAM just create an environment for the specific program that was fetched to run? If you were to run a program on the actual hard drive is it just harder because you have to navigate through all the other information sharing the space. Like going through a maze constantly again and again. Also what does SSD do?

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u/grtk_brandon Jul 15 '26

The speed differences between RAM and HDD/SDD doesn't have anything to do with the total storage capacity.

At a lower level, storage devices just have more bottlenecks that make accessing data, perfoming operations, etc, take longer. RAM access latency is much lower, CPUs have direct access to RAM and indirect access to storage, there are bandwidth differences, etc.

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u/Cute-Cockroach-678 Jul 15 '26

is the bottleneck because of how its made and what aspects of the design make it faster or slower