Thinkpads Forum

Hi!

I have 2GB memory in my X60. I wondered what if I find a fast SD card and make a swapfile on it?

Or: do you know any software solution to make swapfile in the main memory (on a ramdisk)?

I think a fast SD card with 20-30MB/s transfer speed would be enough to make a swapfile on it, and remove the swapfile from the hard disk.

Unfortunately the windows XP has some hidden process which uses the swapfile to work, so disabling the swapfile is not a good idea....

What is the maximumspeed of the builtin SD reader? I used a simple 2GB SD card in it, it has about 2-5MB/s transfer speed. Is there faster cards?

Making a swapfile on flash memory is usually considered a bad idea because the memory has a limited number of read-write (especially write) cycles before it goes bad. It's usually on the order of 100,000 cycles, which is fine for moving data back and forth but bad for intensive activity like swapping out from RAM.

Also, I'd test the write speed carefully to make sure that this will actually be faster than swapping to disk--most flash writes are relatively slow!

don't do it

just don't

seriously

vista will have better memory management so just throw that on there when it comes out

so what the hell you don't have ram? why are you using the slowest possible alternatives?

ram is so much faster than a disk, or even flash.

in fact if one had the resources the faster drives are ramdisk drives made of arrays of ram sticks. not a fast sd memory card.

what the heck do you need this for?

good luck keeping sd cards they'd be dead pretty quick if you did any sort of normal swapping.

Unfortunately the windows XP has some hidden process which uses the swapfile to work, so disabling the swapfile is not a good idea....

Have you tested this yourself? Does having no swap file really break any programs for you?

I only have 1GB RAM but I've been running XP with no paging file for quite some time now. Never had a problem.