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jump drive for RAM?

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attack

Member
Joined
May 23, 2002
In the office today someone said they plugged their jump drive into vista and had the option to use it as RAM. They said it worked great and was cheaper than buying more RAM. This immediately grabbed my attention and I started asking questions and explaining how it would be much slower than normal RAM because of latency of USB and bandwidth and how pagefile would probably be faster.

After talking some more it turns out he has 2gb of RAM anyway so I'm sure he never even used the jump drive for RAM.

My question though, is this is cheap option for anyone who needs RAM? Can it be done with XP? I said it most likely was a gimmick to get joe six pack to buy but I wanted to hear what you all say or know about it.

*edit* anyone know of any software to test it out on? I'll try it but I can't find anything.
 
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Paging to the HD would be faster than paging to a thumbdrive. He may have had RAM and hard drive space confused since I hear people referring to their hard drive space as "memory", ie: "My new computer has 250 gigs of memory!"
 
Sorry to call you guys off, but I did read an article about this in a mag the other day. Its called a boost drive or something boost. You can use a standard flash drive or corsair has one for $599 (wtf). It helps if you dont have much ram and run vista but is nearly pointless if your decent with it. Article didnt specify much beyond that.
 
Flash drives are much faster at seek times for small files, which is why they can be used as ram (and why hard drives have cache).

ReadyBoost is real and there are benefits for people using less than 1gb of ram with Vista (of course if you have enough ram, this is pointless).
 
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