I have a few extra USB Flasg drives around the house. I have A older system with 8mb of Video RAM. Is there any way to get linux to use my flash drives as Video RAM (On USB 2.0 of course)?

No, absolutely not. Video ram is typically faster spec'd than system RAM. Flash is slower than a disk drive (though there is no seek time). The VRAM is also tightly coupled to the GPU for fast fetches, so using a USB device is out of the question.

Flash Memory is faster then HDD thats why they are trying to make Flash HDD drives. (Also use less power).
If it hasn't been tried then no one knows. Anything is better then 8mb Video RAM. (Like SWAP partition or Virtual RAM for Video)

No, flash is slower. The sustained throughput for fast consumer-grade flash is 20MB/s. Hard drives can sustain 50-100MB/sec. The difference is in the lack of seek. Transfer of a large fragmented file or many small files dispersed over the surface of a hard drive will slow the transfer significantly, because the seek becomes a major component of the I/O transaction. Since flash drives have zero seek, they handle the transfer of many small files better - no matter what their position in the flash. Boot-up can require reading thousands of small files, which is why flash helps in that case.

For your usage consideration, comparison with hard drives is not significant. You are comparing only to VRAM, which will have transfer rates up to 64GB/s or higher. In other words, video RAM is 3000x faster than flash. It doesn't need to be tried, it's not even in the ballpark.

You have not been paying atention to what I said. Flash hardrives are in the works and are mutch faster then reguler HDD drives and use less power. The same kind of technology is used for Flash drives. SWAP partition and pageing files are part of the Hard drive used as memory when reguler memory is not enough (Maybe a little slower but the technology still works). If this be the case for reguler memory then why not for Video cards.


It is closed mindedness that prevents atempts. Failing to try is what prohibits the grouth of science. All I whant to do is give it a try if it can be done.

You should go ahead and try that then. Then when you're done, you can work on a faster than light drive and perpetual motion machine. Don't let the laws of physics get in your way! Give it a try. Good luck; I've unsubscribed from this thread.

Flash hardrives are already in the works - http://www.pcworld.com/article/id,126833/article.html. The question wasn't about flash drives but about useing my flash drives as SWAP memory for my video card like HDD already do.