How to use more ram than supported by the MB

robin77 · 04 Dec 2010

Hi,
I use a Gigabyte Board which supports only up to 8 gigs of ram.

I think i have read some article about somehow assigning additional ram... from a usb stick or something... At the time i thought this would be terribly slow and stopped reading, but now I need some additional ram and want to avoid getting a new MB if possible.

The additional memory is needed for several VMs running parallel for testing purposes.
Right now I run into haevy disk swapping and pauses.
Any Ideas?

yowanvista · 04 Dec 2010

Do you mean Ready Boost
ReadyBoost - Setup and Use

robin77 · 04 Dec 2010

yowanvista said:

Do you mean Ready Boost
ReadyBoost - Setup and Use

... i think that was it. but after looking at the article and also this one i'm not sure anymore if this will really help in my case.
it probably might speed things up a bit. (i already have a quite fast 10.000 rpm velociraptor HD)... but i am actually looking for a possibility to add up to the amount of "installed memory" which readyboost doesn't do from what i understand. But i think it might be worth the try.

if anyone can think of a possibility that might help in my case please let me know....
again, i must run several virtual machines parallel... for example 4 machines, each with let's say 3 gb ram (my current MB does not allow more than 8gigs). it's no problem to start the machines with the current configuration, but at some point there will be significant swapping and pausing of applications which must be avoided.

fireberd · 04 Dec 2010

From what I remember reading, ReadyBoost won't help if you have 4GB or more of RAM. I tried it in my PC, when I had 4GB of RAM and it did nothing.

robin77 · 04 Dec 2010

fireberd said:

From what I remember reading, ReadyBoost won't help if you have 4GB or more of RAM. I tried it in my PC, when I had 4GB of RAM and it did nothing.

... just read that this limitation was removed in win7.

Fumz · 04 Dec 2010

robin77 said:

fireberd said:

From what I remember reading, ReadyBoost won't help if you have 4GB or more of RAM. I tried it in my PC, when I had 4GB of RAM and it did nothing.

... just read that this limitation was removed in win7.

I think you may have misread that. ReadyBoost with 4GB of RAM is still pointless. When they say the 4GB limit of Vista has been removed, what they're referring to is the external storage device... not whether it's going to make a difference if you have more than 4GB of RAM.

External storage must meet the following requirements:

Capacity of at least 256 MB, with at least 64 kilobytes (KB) of free space.The 4-GB limit of Windows Vista has been removed.
At least a 2.5 MB/sec throughput for 4-KB random reads
At least a 1.75 MB/sec throughput for 1-MB random writes

Understand ReadyBoost and whether it will Speed Up your System

robin77 · 04 Dec 2010

Fumz said:

I think you may have misread that....

...probably ; )
but from reading further into the article that you linked to, it turns out that Readyboost is probably pointless in my case since i already use a VERY fast HDD

so, is there anything else i could try?
....besides swapping the MB ; )

Fumz · 04 Dec 2010

Given what you want the machine to do, I think perhaps you should consider biting the bullet on this one? You're never going to get the performance you need by attempting a shortcut. It's the interface that's going to be the limiting factor... running several VM's through a USB port just makes me cringe... so instead of thinking that Readyboost or Ramdisks will help, just get a board and more RAM.