[mdlug] supplemental memory?

[Jeff Hanson]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 10:25 AM, Dean Durant <mdlug at wowway.com> wrote:
> Hello, I've gotten to wondering if it's possible to use other devices as memory, like a usb stick, or pcmcia, or even like these little camera memory chips or whatever. This guy where I work has this little tiny chip that he says is 2 GB of storage. It's like half the size of my thumbnail, and not too much thicker. I was amazed when I saw it.
>

They are memory.  FLASH memory is faster than hard drives and much
slower than RAM but with a limited write cycle life.

> And so what I mean is during boot, if the kernel sees some sort of high speed storage, can it use that to load programs or anything?
>
> I know this is a vague question. This is something a legacy OS offered a couple years back or so they claimed. I don't know how well it worked.
>

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost

> If this were possible, I'm thinking I could do things with my old laptop that might be really slow using virtual. Right now I have damn small on my laptop, and it runs well. I just need to upgrade the kernel, get the right wireless device, and see if I can upgrade firefox, and then it will be perfect for my purposes.
>

It will be faster until the FLASH wears out.  The only thing better
than RAM is faster RAM or more RAM.