flash drive as ram, useful?

[ipoststuff]

Hi. I play on my laptop which has 2G ram. I was wondering if it would help to use my USB flash drive as 4G ram. Would i get a better performance playing wow? thanks for help in advance.

[Deleted]

USBs arent ram. its just storage, so it would make no difference

[Fudruker]

ummmm i think your mistaken hard drive space =/= memory

[akaTheDude]

ummmm i think your mistaken hard drive space =/= memory

This .......

[InfernalKatana]

Don't listen to the above posters, they're either confused or don't know what you're talking about. You are referring to the windows memory extender called ReadyBoost.

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

Yes you could use it, but my biggest problem is performance. It would be VERY slow ram. This is an advantage over your computer using the hard drive swap file, but you're not going to see a major upgrade in performance in gaming. The only way this would be a real upgrade is if you didn't have enough memory (sub 1 gig) to load the windows kernel into memory.

If you want a better experience, get more REAL memory.

[Adon]

Don't listen to the above posters...........get more REAL memory.

True. Also, memory is really cheap these days.

[Deleted]

Flash drives are faster for small read/write operations than conventional hard drives, which means that Readyboost is really just a slightly better place to store small virtual memory data segments.

But overall speed is still several hundred times slower than proper RAM.

[Tehpyrate]

Its dumb. RAM is written to based on a single address at single row.

Flash is written to in pages.

Guess which takes longer and you figure out why you shouldn't do it.

[Nalnik]

It will have a slight effect.

You would be better off with actual internal ram, but as a quick and dirty measure it might help.

Overall, remember to keep your hard drive defraged. That will have a greater effect than the ReadyBoost drive.

[vesseblah]

ReadyBoost can not be used to extend the physical RAM of computer, it's primarily meant to be a way to add bigger disc cache. In case of WoW the main exe would be probably placed on the USB drive and it would speed up loading the game for the first time, but it will not give performance boost while the game is running.