I think Tanuj was thinking of ReadyBoost, a feature in Windows Vista that lets you use a USB stick as an extension to your paging cache.

This is something that your hard disk is used for when you run out of RAM to do the work in hand. Caching this data on a memory stick, as well as writing it to hard disk, might speed up access to it when it's needed again. But this isn't adding USB memory to the pool of RAM, because, as Christian says, the bus speeds on USB are far too low for it to be useful as RAM, and that's not going to change in the foreseeable future. All this really does is give you somewhat faster access to things that your system has already overflowed from RAM onto disk.

More info on how it works, and its limitations, is here.

@myself said:

a maximum of 80 MB/s troughput even with the most current technology

just noticed this statement is incomplete - 80 MB/s is refering to the flash-memory - USB is limited to 60MB/s in best case and if the full bandwidth is available.
christian

Hmm, but a dedicated bank of flash ram devices in a 1000Gb configuration with an appropriate dedicated controller is also not far off, in which case, streaming direct would be possible, or at least much smaller head/tail samples in RAM....

Miklos.

this is something i've been already thinking about ... but tending more to a real RAM-disk sitting directly on some PCI-slot ... or at least a flashdisk connected to an sATA port
christian

@cm said:

this is something i've been already thinking about ... but tending more to a real RAM-disk sitting directly on some PCI-slot ... or at least a flashdisk connected to an sATA port
christian

Here in Moscow, there's a product line being sold that uses flash memory as a RAM extension.
A large (GB) flash card plugs into a card reader, which is connected to a Sata pci or cardbuss card of some flavour.
I don't know enough about this to know if it actually does what it says on the pack.

Seems a simple solution to more RAM, but again, i'm not smart enough with computers to know. And i'd have no idea how to tell the OS (Apple) it's got more resource to use, if this is genuine.

Regards,

Alex.

Wouldn't it then be a matter of treating the flash drive like just that - a drive.

Miklos.

@mpower88 said:

Wouldn't it then be a matter of treating the flash drive like just that - a drive.

Miklos.

Miklos, you may well be right, and even i can see that makes sense.

But it's being touted as additional RAM, not a flash drive, and i have a suspicion that the sales material is being somewhat 'creative' with the truth. I simply don't enough about the process.

Regards,

Alex.

A drive would not have the limitations of how much ram the OS can see - it could be as much as a hard drive - 500gb or more, just a LOT faster. Than the software can be tailored to have smaller headers and footers of samples loaded, since the load time from the flash drive would be faster, and you would be more out of your existing ram.

Miklos.

@mpower88 said:

A drive would not have the limitations of how much ram the OS can see - it could be as much as a hard drive - 500gb or more, just a LOT faster. Than the software can be tailored to have smaller headers and footers of samples loaded, since the load time from the flash drive would be faster, and you would be more out of your existing ram.

Miklos.

I can see the advantage of this, even with my modest computer skills. So, if i copy an application to a flash drive, open it, and use it, it's possible it will run a lot faster, and take the load off the system drive? (I'm on mac) Of course as soon as the flash drive is disengaged, or turned off, any data or program will be lost.
And the application will surely still need to access the system drive for components, and the foundation of the system OS, including RAM? (I've often wondered if putting all my applications on another HD would speed the system up, or slow it down.)

I might try this, just as an experiment.

Regards,

Alex.

No I think flash drives remember their data without power, in fact I'm pretty certain of it - this is one of the things that makes them better than RAM and hard drives - they are much faster than a hard drive and a lot more flexible than ram.

Miklos.

@Another User said:

... not taking truth too serious ...

haha ... that's true ...
everything connected via sATA is a drive, not memory.
what you _can_ do, at least on windows, is create a driveletter for such a device and direct the pagefile to use it (very similar to the ready boost technology)
good: (almost) no latency - bad: flash allows just about 100.000 write-cycles - very bad: OS X does not allow to configure pagefile.
for such an intended use take a RAM-drive like this would be the better and faster solution.

for loading samples nothing beats real RAM
christian

Your pessismism almost reduces me to tears christian..... so somber.... plus I'm listening to toccata and fugue right now - but I take this as the dark side of your light and await the future wonderful products you produce!

[:)]

Best,
Miklos.

haha - miklos, you haven't yet heard me elaborating pessimistically ... my second name is *blackpainter* [:P]