Do they make USB ram?

Writing to the hard drive is faster than pushing data over USB. It’s faster to write to a page file on disc. Hence, no USB RAM. Sorry to disappoint.

Ohhh well I just figured maaaaaybe heh

Hard to say for iBook, but I think WinVista introduced some feature, that could use any USB stick as an additional RAM.

@LanceVance: That’s not true. The point of RAM is to provide memory that can be written to and read from quickly. You can read and write to the HDD faster than you can transfer data over USB. USB RAM wouldn’t be of any help at all.

On a sidenote, how fast will USB3 be? Might it be possible with USB3?

I remember reading something about this before, and thought the same thing as richardhenry mentions. It sounds like a gimmick to wow those who don’t know. So did a quick search, a quick summary of what I found.

The Vista feature is called ReadyBoost and it looks like flash memory (like usb drives) balances out the slow transfer speed with faster seek times, so it’s only used in cases where the shorter seek time counters the actual time to move the data. (I’m thinking maybe if you’re recovering lots of tiny files from cache?) Since a hard drive has to physically move to the location of the information, read, and then transfer it looses some or all of the edge it has in how fast it can actually push the data. Also, remember we’re talking times in milliseconds here on all counts.

Wikipedia knows more than I do ;) and The Google turns up lots of results as well.

@wilhel1812: Writing to disc will still be faster than USB 3, and likely always will be as there is a processing delay involved with USB transfers. Not to mention that additional software to deal with USB RAM allocation would likely slow things down even more. I don’t think USB is a good route to increase the RAM capacity of a computer, or ever will be. Plus; what happens if the USB device is disconnected while data is being swapped? We end up with data corruption. It’s too dangerous.