Flash-based Storage into Ram

Question

You guys might have noticed the new generation netbooks with flash based rom. Since they are so affordable i ordered a netbook with following specifications:
1.83GHz Intel Atom Z3735F processor;
2GB DDR3 RAM;
32GB flash storage, expandable via sd card;
11.6-inch screen, Integrated Graphics (1GB);
Windows 10 operating system.

I have seen people using their USBs as additional RAM (it never really worked for me) via readyboost etc. and more recently people using their sd card in their android phones.

So indirectly it is already being done, but is anybody doing this on a netbook? and How?

Answer 1

I think you are confusing technologies. USB flash drives are storage devices, they do not provide additional RAM. RAM is high speed volatile memory, which is used by the CPU to do its work.

The reason flash drives can't be used as RAM is speed. While flash drives and the USB bus has gotten faster over time, it simply isn't fast enough. Assuming a base clock speed of 100Mhz, DDR3 can write at 6400 megabytes per second. A really fast USBv3 flash drive will write at 190 megabytes per second. That's over 33 times slower than RAM - and that's just sequential access. Random access is almost 100,000 times slower. Simply put, using flash memory as RAM would be excruciatingly slow.

ReadyBoost does not increase RAM either. In short, ReadyBoost caches data from your slower reading hard drive to the faster reading flash memory drive. This was slightly helpful for older, slower, low memory computers, but not for modern computers.