[mdlug] supplemental memory?

[Adam Tauno Williams]

On Tue, 2010-03-23 at 10:55 -0400, Jeff Hanson wrote:
> 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

This is not necessarily true.  Benchmarking thumb drives, flash cards,
etc... shows a wide, if not huge, performance spread.  And in any case:
if it connects via USB then your SATA drive is going to be faster.

> > 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?

This isn't possible.

> > 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

It didn't work;  certainly not as you describe.  It merely used the
device's capacity as a file-system cache.  Which may or may not have
been much of a win;  given that it is essentially forgotten I think it
is safe to assume "not win".

> > 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.

If the chip costs you $40 and you can get a new laptop for $399 - that
chip is already 10% the cost of replacing the laptop.  Replacing the
laptop is where you will reap big performance improvements.

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