Use SD-card as ram

No, you can't use an SD card as "RAM" - if you run out of RAM, your internal boot drive will be accessed in order to sort of give you "more" RAM.

Sine RAM is so cheap, I would suggest upgrading your RAM. For me, 8GB is the 'sweet spot' - although your machine can handle up to 16GB of 204-pin PC3-12800 (1600 MHz) DDR3 SO-DIMMs.

Clinton

SD cards CANNOT be used as RAM, period.

They are the same class of device as external hard drives,

USB memory sticks, Compact Flash cards, etc., etc.

Even if it were possible, which it isn't, it would be

excruciatingly slow, i.e. 100 to 300 times slower

or more.

You are thinking maybe the swap files can be moved to an SD card, under the impression that maybe virtual memory paging will be faster going to a solid state storage device, then going to the mechnical rotating media boot drive? It is a good theory, however, the SD card inferface and typical SD cards are slower than most disk drives. NOTE: moving the swap files to an external drive/SD card is non-trivial, non-standard, and could easily go wrong.

As clintonfrombirmingham said, upgrading the RAM in the Mac mini is a better use of your time and momey. Or replacing your internal disk with a high quality fast internal SATA 2.5" Solid State Disk (which will give you the faster virtual memory paging with a device that is fast using an interface that is also fast. But RAM First. Alway more RAM first.

mikkel-kj wrote:

But I have heard that someone used a sdcard to help the ram, so it would like be more ram.

Then you should talk to the "someone" to whom you refer. Unless they have come up with some new technology, using any external device for swap files will be excruciatingly slow compared to how you computer works now, assuming you are successful in setting it up.

In some systems you can use a USB flash drive or SD card to expand the system's virtual memory footprint and thereby increase the amount of "offline RAM storage" that can be used. This will allow less of the system's built-in RAM to be occupied by unused tasks; however, this is not RAM. OS X does not handle virtual memory in this way, so you cannot manipulate the virtual memory allocation in this manner. As others have said, you ultimately cannot use any flash drive as RAM, period. To give it some perspective, RAM has a thoughput of many gigabytes per second (around 10 or so GB/s for PC3-10600 RAM), which is way faster than the ~500-700 megabytes per second maximal throughput of a USB 3.0 connection. Additionally, physical RAM is on a completely separate bus that is closely tied to the processor, whereas USB and other I/O devices are run through separate controllers.