Flash Drive RAM For PC

[Patt]

is there a way to plug in a usb flash drive and make it part of the systems RAM??

[ShinmaRyuu]

I am pretty sure no. It runs on a different bus and trust me you don't want your system running the clogged up USB bus.

Here is a better example of why no from good ol Leo http://ask-leo.com/can_i_use_a_usb_ram_sti...tem_memory.html

That being said under Vista you can use a Flash drive to increase performance. It's called Ready Boost if you want to google around for it or use this search term "USB flash drive and vista"

[Patt]

could you copy the ram data onto a flashdrive and have a program to make it the ram format instead of fat or fat32??

[SomeoneE1se]

How do you think Ram works and in the end what are you trying to do?

[Patt]

in the end im trying to use my 2GB Flash Drive as "External RAM" so my computer isnt so laggy.

[Sparda]

in the end im trying to use my 2GB Flash Drive as "External RAM" so my computer isnt so laggy.

Using USB flash as RAm will only make things slower.

[cooper]

Flash memory is (comparatively) slow, even when compared to a harddisk, especially when it comes to writing to it.

But feel free to try to use it as ram by placing your swapfile on it.

[unasoto]

would you want to use it as virtual memory? is usb flash faster than your HD?

[Patt]

sure ill use it a virtual memory just tell me how.

[moonlit]

I really wouldn't recommend trying to put your virtual memory on a flash drive, but if you really want to try it...

Right click My Computer, choose Properties, click the Advanced tab, Performance Settings (the Settings button in the Performance settings area), Advanced, then Change... this is your virtual memory settings.

You might render Windows unbootable if this doesn't work out so be careful.

[unasoto]

sure ill use it a virtual memory just tell me how.

I was asking if that would work. right click my computer then properties then advanced then performance setting then advanced and then change settings and select your flash drive like I said I don't know how well it will work flash should be faster than HD. if I'm wrong someone correct me.

[moonlit]

Beat you to it unasoto ;)

A flash drive will be much slower than a hard drive. For the best performance, put your virtual memory on a partition on another disk if you have more than one...

By that I mean if you have 2 HDDs... say 1 is your Windows drive and maybe you have a second, it's better to put your paging file on the second drive because the more disk access there is on a drive the slower the performance of the paging will be.

[Patt]

thanks guys ill try it out on my flash drive and/or on my 20 gb seccond HD

[digip]

better off with an xd card with built in reader, but still slow because is an added device not meant to be for high speeddata transfer. Even USB 2.0 and Firewire are not going to beat your hard drives speed.

I personally use an extra harddrive and have it set up for my swap file/virtual mem whatever you want to call it. Even if you have an old 2 gig or whatever laying around, use the entire available space on the drive as extended memory but make sure it doesn't exceed more than double your maximum ram or it kid of defeats the purpose. Will ony create more lag if your virtual memory far outways your physical ram. Keep them sort of close together in size (or at least on Windows, anyway).

[Deveant]

Will ony create more lag if your virtual memory far outways your physical ram. Keep them sort of close together in size (or at least on Windows, anyway).

isnt it u should only go 40% higher for ur VMem than your Physical RAM?

[thesilvester]

If you have vista and a newer usb drive you could use it as a readyboost drive

[digip]

isnt it u should only go 40% higher for ur VMem than your Physical RAM?

Here is a good article to work from. http://www.aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.php

I personally find that if your using large files and your only using 512 megs or lower, double that virtual space because you will surely use up the ram in no time. The larger your ram, the less you will need in virtual space, but your going to reach a limit eventually. Windows doesn't handle anything over 4 gig, so if you have 2 gig of ram and a virtual mem set at 2 gig, your going to be ok, but once it tries to go beyond that it usually craps out (that is if its working with something over that limit, even with virtual ram over that of your physical, but in smaller ram environments, like 128 meg, you can easily set a swap file of 512)

[lunex]

an old 2 gig

An old 2 gig would be ridiculously slow.

I just did some tests on XP and it would appear that access to the page file is done randomly on 4kb blocks(1 page). :shock: That's rather inefficient, taking into account that hard disk drives store a few megabytes on each cylinder. Hopefully the disk's cache can speed it up a little. This brings up the possibility that a USB 2.0 flash drive might actually be a faster swap disk than a hard disk since flash drives can sometimes be faster with small, random access.

Then again, you might just do one better by paying the few dollars more to get RAM, rather than a flash drive.

[Patt]

wouldnt a firewire 800 be faster than usb 2.0?? is there any firewire flash drives??

[digip]

an old 2 gig

If your using a second hard drive, and not using a swap file on the main hard drive at all, but only on the second hard drive, you shoul dsee an increase in performance, not less. An old 2 gig(or larger) could still be one with 7200 or more rpm disk speed. And it wasn't to be used for extra storage, just for the pagefile.

[lunex]

an old 2 gig

If your using a second hard drive' date=' and not using a swap file on the main hard drive at all, but only on the second hard drive, you shoul dsee an increase in performance, not less. An old 2 gig(or larger) could still be one with 7200 or more rpm disk speed. And it wasn't to be used for extra storage, just for the pagefile.[/quote']

I wasn't saying that it would cause a decrease in performance. I was doubting that it would cause a great performance increase. Even a slow 2gb HDD would increase performance by allowing under used pages to be moved out of physical memory, allowing more space for active memory. More space allows larger more complex programs to be run. However, we can only make full use of CPU power so long as the disk that holds the swap/pagefile can keep up with what the CPU is doing. If the CPU is trying to channel 4MB/s of memory bandwidth to the disk, but the disk can only handle 3MB/s, then the CPU will have to slow down. We can fix that by using a 40GB HDD that can handle 15MB/s bandwidth.

Another note: RPMs are not the only factor for the bandwidth of a hard drive. You must factor in how much data can be read each rotation. Higher capacity HDDs generally have more data per cylinder, allowing greater bandwidth per RPM. Just because it's 7200RPM doesn't mean it is at all fast.

[thefatmoop]

i dont know if someone said this but in

vista u can use external storage as virtual ram and it will by higher priority than the virtual ram (vr) that the vista is installed on.

although if you look online you can get the benchmarks on transfer rates on flashdrives

atm a good flashdrive only gets like 30read / 25write megs per sec

some drives are faster than others (lexar makes fast ones i think)

now if you at a single channel of ddr2 800 (6400) ram, it gets like 7-8 GIGs per second

make that dual chanel u got 14+ gigs per sec data rate

14 gigs per sec >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> 20-30 megs per sec

(if you dont know what virtual ram is, if your ram fills up it will start using storage for ram)

for extra info umm harddrives have different rates like a WD raptor 10k rpm drive gets a much faster read/write speed then a 7400 rpm seagate standard drive

im not sure but harddrives dont get over 100megs/sec and remember just because u have sata and u see the 3gigs/sec thats the transfer rate of the copmuter to harddrive components. thats not how fast the harddrive can read info from the disks.

if anything above is wrong please someone correct me

[Patt]

so i should do what

[godsponge]

Also, flash drives are only good for so many writes. It would die MUCH faster using it as swap space/RAM.

If you need to make your machine go faster, the RAM, Processor, and Motherboard are the most important factors. Upgrading one of those will do way more than trying to use a flash drive. It's just not fast enough and would die too fast to be used very long.

If your virtual memory is too small, increasing that might give you a performance boost, but no hard drive has a faster access time than RAM. More or better RAM would probably be your best option to increase computer performance.