Using an External USB Hard Drive As Swap Space????

[shgadwa]

I've been thinking... I've got this external 250GB USB hard drive, that we are not using. What if I set it up as swap??? Would that make it any faster than the swap that is partitioned in my laptop hard drive?? Also, could I set it up so that it was a 'secondary swap'? That is, only works if I have it plugged in but if I am out and about, I could use the internal swap? How would that work?

Just a thought.

EDIT:

I've been thinking more about this... I'd only do it if it could be set up as a secondary swap. That is that the computer can still work good if I unplug. And, I'd like it to have plug n' play support so that I do not have to keep on turning on swap everytime I want a little more speed. Then on second though, this computer is quite fast, even though its not the best (1 GB RAM, 1.86Ghz Dual Core CPU, etc).

Also, I've got a lot of space... which would be faster, a larger swap within my internal hard drive, or a really large swap (maybe 10-100GB) in an external hard drive? Is the difference even noticable?

Thanks.

~Shawn

[asturm]

1.: swap is terribly slow. so is USB, which will slow down your system even more. plus sucks cpu time.
2.: go look for some cheap RAM upgrade if your system seriously needs swap.

[shgadwa]

Ok thank you... thats kind of what I was thinking, although I thought it might be nice if it would work. its ok regardless. This comptuer is not that slow at all