Using RAM disks?

[iantresman]

I've run out of system memory (512Mb, 20,000 files, 900K unique word), and it's not cost effective for me to upgrade since I'm using both RAM banks.

I understand that using a hard disk drive is probably not a good idea because of the low data transfer speeds.

But would it be possible to use a 1G SmartCard as a Ram drive?

Regards,
Ian Tresman

[David]

To purchase 1GB of RAM it is about $110 USD at the moment. But you could sell your existing 512GB of RAM on E-Bay for about $50. So the upgrade cost is about $60. Which is probably about the same as a 1GB Flash card.

The indexing process was designed to avoid using the hard disk when possible as using RAM is much faster.

USB connected SmartCards (using Flash memory) are slower than a normal disk drive for sequential reads and writes. (Hard drives are ~50MB/sec, Flash is ~25MB/sec). So by adding a flash card, you are really just adding an additional slow hard disk to your system. Needless to say, this is not going to solve your RAM problems.