readyboost for Ubuntu?

[MG&TL]

I have had to use Windows 7 recently, and I noticed that there was an option to use a USB as 'pseudo-RAM', known as 'readyBoost'. Is there something like this for Ubuntu?

Any help appreciated, this is a newb question.

[diasf]

Hi,
(from the top of my head, some details might be wrong)

You can create swap files on any filesystem (as well as activate them with swapon/swapoff). I suppose that, if you create a swap file on the usb drive and activate it, it will be used. Probably not as optimized as in windows (that he uses it differently than swap itself) but it's a start

[MG&TL]

Oh, cool, thanks, hadn't thought of that. Will it be an faster than hard disk swap?

[walt.smith1960]

If your machine has a reasonable amount of RAM (2 GB+), you probably don't need it. Ubuntu uses way less RAM than Windows. For doing ordinary tasks on a 4GB. desktop I've run without swap even and never came close to running out of RAM. I'm pretty sure using a USB drive for swap would be slower than using the hard drive for swap. I haven't created a swap partition for the past several installs. Instead I create a swap file. The only downside I see is that I can't use hibernation (suspend to disk). I use suspend (to RAM) instead and Ubuntu cold boots fast enough that I don't miss the ability to suspend to disk. I guess if I used elaborate desktops that take time to recreate suspend to disk would make sense. Here is one pretty simple guide to creating a swap file:
http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linux-a...ap-file-howto/

[MG&TL]

It doesn't. That's why I'm asking. My other machine ran windows7, this one ran XP badly, and occasionally I run system-intensive devloper tools and/or simulations.

OK, thanks for the help. Marking thread as solved. Very helpful indeed, machine is running somewhat faster now.

[mightyiam]

Here's how I did it in my blog.