Thumb drive ram for Vista

I have heard that with Vista, it is possible to increase the Ram by inserting a (presumably empty) thumb drive into a USB port. That would, of course, be an easy and relatively cheap way to increase Ram. Does anyone know if this a. is right and b. will work well?

 

Yes, it's called Windows ReadyBoost:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/community/enhancements.mspx

The USB flash drive needs to be a fast one. The fastest drives I know of:

1. Buffalo RUF2-R and RUF2-S
2. PQI U339 Pro and Intelligent Stick Pro
3. Crucial Gizmo!
4. A-Data PD? (3? I forgot)
5. Patriot Extreme Performance

Most of the flash drives that are really cheap or free after rebate have less than one third the speed of the above drives. (< 8 MB/s for cheap drives, vs 25-32 MB/s for fast drives)

 

The memory stick does not act as extra ram, it acts as extra cache capabilities. If you insert a 1GB stick into a computer with 1GB you wont get 2GB. If that were true, why would they even bother making memory sticks larger then 256mb? I would just stick a 4GB memory stick in.

Quote from Paul thurrott super site for windows;

"ReadyBoost uses spare space on USB-based storage devices like memory keys to increase the performance of your computer. It does this by caching information to the USB device, which is typically much faster than writing to the hard drive. Information cached to the device is encrypted so it can't be read on other systems."

 

A nice feature being placed in new Vista-ready motherboards (in notebooks and desktops) is ~512MB - 1GB of flash memory to act as a built-in ReadyBoost system. So in a few months most new systems will already have it built-in.