Using a thumb drive as RAM

actually this is not quite the whole story. I watched that video and it seems that windows can span virtual memory across several drives. as you mention you can move the swap file to a different drive/partition but AFAIK you can't use two different partitions for swap at the same time in OS X. At least I've never heard of this. IMO it would be quite pointless too but that seems to be the point of that video.

Hi,

No.

Sorry. 🙂

why would you ever want to do that?! OS X already uses virtual memory when it has to. allocating virtual memory to an external drive like a USB thumb drive will result in even slower virtual memory performance than when it uses your main hard drive for the same thing. or are you saying that your main hard drive is completely full? get a bigger drive then or offload some files to an external. more RAM might be in order too.

Message was edited by: V.K.

Sorry it this sounds a bit too obvious, but simply because Microsoft added the feature to their operating system.

I'm sure Apple could add such a feature if they chose to, but they haven't at this time.

You could always suggest it to them:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html

All they are doing is putting the swap file on the USB drive. It will work, but I doubt you will notice any increase in speed. Flash drives tend to have slow write speeds. You can do the same thing on OS X with Terminal commands.

Whoops. Thanks for clarifying Malcolm.

Hi jskrainka;

As Malcoln says they are putting the Swap file on a USB flash drive. Personally I think if you have anything going to your swap files it is an indication that you don't have enough RAM. Instead of moving the swap file to USB flash drive which will only slow your system down, I would suggest you increase the amount of RAM in your Mac to reduce the use of swap files.

Allan

Wow got onto this page right after I saw this video too. I was googling how to use flash drive as virtual memory in mac osx, and this was the first page I found. Thanks for asking the same question I was going to ask, and I thank everyone for their answers.