Using SD CARD as RAM - General Questions and Answers

Hey! Is there any possibility to create virtual memory on my HTC (p3600) like use SD card memory to create virtual memory?

It would be the slowest ram ever seen

so... what's the data transmition top velocity (how many mbps?(in MB please))

Is it really possible?

I think that if we want to, we can lol!
I just want to know how fast is the processing between a SD card and the HTC... like... if we can see movies, listen to music play 3D games at 60 fps (like duke nuken 3d) I think that we can create a Ram Virtual memory just like your mac/pc. Hmn... and if it's slow with a SD card... maybe try to use some internal memory... what do HTC (I'm refering to my HTC p3600) Ram have so special?

Nothing special, seems you are confusing RAM and Flash, they are completely different technologies, RAM is a volatile memory and fast by nature to work with CPU, flash is persistent but slow (compared to RAM) to work as storage; even if you could create a swap file to simulate RAM, if won't work at RAM speed so your device would become slow as hell.
More, RAM space (physical or emulated) is pretty dynamic, it does a lot of read/write all time, so if you emulate it, you'd need a storage device that can bear all that stress like hard disks, but if you use flash, cards would become unusable after a short time so I really doubt there's a program that emulates RAM for PocketPCs.

I'm thinking on xdandroid running from the sd card? can some one run all wm6.x from the sd making the phone have 16 gb of internal memory?

Related

Virtual memory (swap) on SD Card (WM6)

Hello everybody. I want to know if there is a way (a methode or a software) to create virtual memory on the SD Card and use it as RAM memory (like the swap file in Windows XP).I Have a HTC Trinity WM6 with FAMAN 4.03 beta3 ROM.
And thanx
Why would you want to do this? Most memory cards have very low read & write speeds compared to the real ram so it would slow your device down a lot.
I want to play some games that use huge space of ram (such as call of duty 2, syberia 1 & 2 ...)
Just hunt down in the specific forum for your phone and examine the different ROMs available. You might find one that is maximized for high available RAM. With my Wizard i've found ROMs that can range from 20mb free to 30mb free. Just have to do some digging. Good thing that some ROM cooks provide screenshots of the memory settings page so you can see the available program/storage memory available.
Thank you for the reply, i'll do that.. by the way, were can I find a good software to optimize RAM
SKtools
You may want to try SKtools Auto Clean. But don't expect a revolution ...
I did the memory maid test and it said that the system could read and write at 100Mbyte/s having something to do with the SD card, so it must be possible, although the cards external readings where 8 Mbyte/s
you are misreading something somewhere
even the fastests harddisks rarely do 100MB/sec
fast sdcards do 8MB/sec but only in readers
the sd interface of pda's prob can't read more then 2MB/sec
you can bench using pocket mechanics
even though it is not practical i still am interested in using sd card as swap space can it be done? has it been done?
WinMo doesn't support swap concept.
If you are out of RAM, you are out of RAM.
stepw said:
WinMo doesn't support swap concept.
If you are out of RAM, you are out of RAM.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
SUCKS!
Titan always has a problem even with the best roms
This is probably off topic, but, where can i find that tweak that speeds up sd card transfer rate, i read about it somewhere but can't find it now.
Search for tnyynt sd card tune-up.
meys_toumi said:
Hello everybody. I want to know if there is a way (a methode or a software) to create virtual memory on the SD Card and use it as RAM memory (like the swap file in Windows XP).I Have a HTC Trinity WM6 with FAMAN 4.03 beta3 ROM.
And thanx
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Did you rescue a problem ? I have WM6.5 and I want make too a virtual memory on the SD Card. I have HTC p3600. What can I do ? Thenks !!

combining memory on touch pro

Hi all, I'm not sure if it is already done, but when I open memory to see how much I spend and how much is still left I see that the phone splits memory for data use and memory for program use. is it possible to combine those to program use only? or does the pro does that automatic when program mem is full? because I bought a microsdhc cart and all my data is doing on that.
thanks in advanced!
You must be new to Windows Mobile. Windows Mobile devices has 2 types of memory, RAM and ROM. Since WM5, RAM is used to maintain running processes. ROM is used as storage (unlike pre WM5, where RAM is splitted between storage and running programs and ROM storage is hidden).
Touch Pro has 288MB RAM (about 200MB usable) and 512MB ROM (about 318MB usable). This is due to the amount of RAM used by OS (while running) and ROM used by OS (in storage).
When you insert your MicroSD card, you'll see a new folder in File Explorer. It's called Storage Card.
So, in simple statement, no, you can't combined the memory as they are different types of memory.
in other words, its like trying to combine your desktop PC RAM memory with DVD disk storage space.
lol okay I very much understand what your saying. I am new at wm idd. but hell no with computers I actually do a study Informatica but just didnt knew how wm was made or never really looked into it. I thought it was just like a harddisk on a pc were you install your programs & data like music. and it uses the RAM memory for running programs I installed on the harddisk. but never mind very much thnx for the explanation!

Memory stored on external instead of internal

i just thought about ROM's made to store memory on SD cards instead of being stored internaly. can anyone explain y it wouldnt work or y anyone hasnt done it yet?
also wanted to add, by doing this change of memory storage it would speed up the system by 50%. it would also be a + for people who play video games on their smart phones Zonia, Inotia, MMO's ect"""
An SD card, or any format of memory card for that matter, can only be used for the storage of data. It behaves like a hard disk. Data on it must be serially 'read' into a main memory buffer, before it can be accessed by your device's processor.
You can't replace 'real' memory with it or try to use it as real memory.
hijack562 said:
doing this change of memory storage it would speed up the system by 50%
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
why?
10 characters
so cant you partition a sd card to be used as real memory? or can it be possible to compress real memory?
and why you ask? cuz it would be nice to play games on a smart phone that only comes with 200mb or less memory. but has a fairy decent processor
Too Slow
The reason they don't do that is because SD cards are MUCH slower than memory. the fastest SD cards (Class 10) only transfer data at 10 MB/s. Memory on the other hand transfers data in the range of gigabytes per second. Even if the memory used a very "slow" rate of 1GB/s that is still 100x faster than a SD card is.
really?? a class 10 only reads 10mb per sec?? dam thats slow...but isnt a sd card consider a soild state drive or not?
Take a close look at an SD card. It only has 9 pins on it. In standard mode two of them aren't used, leaving 7. After 1 x Chip Select, 1 x Power, 2 x Ground, and 1 x Clock, that leaves two pins - namely 1 x Data In and 1 x Data Out.
Not a 32 bit data/address bus like an x86 or ARM processor, but a single, one bit wide bus.
A byte of stored data comes out of the Data Out line as 8 bits, one at a time.
Commands to the card, to ask it to retrieve/store the data you want, have to be sent down the Command/Data In line the same way. Data to be written to the card goes in down the same Data In line the same way, again one bit at a time.
Even though the clock rate can, in theory, be wound up to 25Mhz, it is still a tedious process to get data in and out of the thing.
True solid state drives use the SATA interface, a different type of interface, still serial as above, but the clock rates are much, much higher allowing 1.5 to 6.0 GBit/s transfer rates.
Memory cards can be considered solid state drives, just damned slow ones.
Sorry if this isn't directed towards OP but since we are talking about SD cards anyways I thought I'd ask. Any way to tell what class your SD card is? I have a 16GB one so I'm assuming its class 10.
New cards have the class number on the label, as Class n, or as a capital 'C' with the class number in it.

[Q] About swap space, this device and cyanogenmod

This may be a general question for all android devices or not but I was curious about adding swap space to this device. It has 1 gig of ram and many may consider that to be enough, and it might be. I have cyanogenmod 10.2 installed and tried to enable zram, 10% seems to be the best setting as anthing higher caused a game to pop up a notice saying something about low memory and defaulting to lower values. When I checked to see if zram was used however it turns out it was, about 25mb - 34mb after booting. The issue with zram is when multitasking with lecturenotes and moonreader, The tablet would reboot and my notebook that was open in lecturenotes would be missing notes I took or the settings would be greatly messed up, or both. This was with 10%.
I am thinking since it was used, it might be helpful to have an sd card for this reason, to aid in multitasking. This is important to me because I run several apps at once (I wish cyanogenmod had multi windows, and google wouldn't threaten over it). So the question is will there be a benifit to buying an sd card on ebay (class 10 of course) and using it as swap space. It seems this tablet might be on the cusp of the memory being enough. Also I am thinking this might help to future proof it a bit when updating to newer releases of gyanogenmod. The sd card I was thinking of is 4 gigs and may plan on having 1gb swap space (this tablet is for school and other work). The tablet has 32gb storage and that is more than enough for me (I am only using 3gb of space) so I wont need to add anymore storage.
I should also add that when multitasking without zram enabled, the tablet reboots less but still has done it, and so far nothing has been lost in my notebooks. I am thinking that the memory of 1gb is starting to reach its limit, with no apps running I am consuming about 600mbs of it.
vanquishedangel said:
This may be a general question for all android devices or not but I was curious about adding swap space to this device. It has 1 gig of ram and many may consider that to be enough, and it might be. I have cyanogenmod 10.2 installed and tried to enable zram, 10% seems to be the best setting as anthing higher caused a game to pop up a notice saying something about low memory and defaulting to lower values. When I checked to see if zram was used however it turns out it was, about 25mb - 34mb after booting. The issue with zram is when multitasking with lecturenotes and moonreader, The tablet would reboot and my notebook that was open in lecturenotes would be missing notes I took or the settings would be greatly messed up, or both. This was with 10%.
I am thinking since it was used, it might be helpful to have an sd card for this reason, to aid in multitasking. This is important to me because I run several apps at once (I wish cyanogenmod had multi windows, and google wouldn't threaten over it). So the question is will there be a benifit to buying an sd card on ebay (class 10 of course) and using it as swap space. It seems this tablet might be on the cusp of the memory being enough. Also I am thinking this might help to future proof it a bit when updating to newer releases of gyanogenmod. The sd card I was thinking of is 4 gigs and may plan on having 1gb swap space (this tablet is for school and other work). The tablet has 32gb storage and that is more than enough for me (I am only using 3gb of space) so I wont need to add anymore storage.
I should also add that when multitasking without zram enabled, the tablet reboots less but still has done it, and so far nothing has been lost in my notebooks. I am thinking that the memory of 1gb is starting to reach its limit, with no apps running I am consuming about 600mbs of it.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Well in my own personal testing i could not see any benefit while extracting 700mb archives under android with 4gb swap space on a 40mbs microsd card, while under full linux desktop with a same workload, swap differently helps keep the system smooth under heavy io load. The conclusion i drew was the android platform deals to memory management differently than the typical desktop os, due to slower emmc chips used as a boot disk for the majority of android devices using this slow, already bottlenecked memory as swap space doesn't make sense (not to mention the use of 2gb swap space on a limited 16gb storage etc), so android runs almost completely in ram, with stricter memory management and allocation allows android to run fine without swap space, although because of this, androids memory management makes little uses of available swap space
JoinTheRealms said:
Well in my own personal testing i could not see any benefit while extracting 700mb archives under android with 4gb swap space on a 40mbs microsd card, while under full linux desktop with a same workload, swap differently helps keep the system smooth under heavy io load.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've been running my desktop without swap for the last 10 years, and as long as you have enough RAM for all your running programs, there will be no problem at all.
Extracting an archive is a mostly sequential operation (single read stream, single write stream), so it also doesn't benefit from caching, which could use the memory that is freed by swapping.
_that said:
I've been running my desktop without swap for the last 10 years, and as long as you have enough RAM for all your running programs, there will be no problem at all.
Extracting an archive is a mostly sequential operation (single read stream, single write stream), so it also doesn't benefit from caching, which could use the memory that is freed by swapping.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ahh that makes sense. I wasnt sure if swap had an effect directly on the extraction, but seem keeped the rest system more stable/ smooth duing the process in the case of GNU/Linux, with swap off similar operations such as installing packages would more oftern lock the tablet up. Might be a placebo though
I also dont set swap on my Linux desktop, as it has plenty of ram but the benitfit of swap space is somewhat more noticable due to the lack of ram on the tf700.
JoinTheRealms said:
I also dont set swap on my Linux desktop, as it has plenty of ram but the benitfit of swap space is somewhat more noticable due to the lack of ram on the tf700.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I just want to share my user experiences on the swap space... It does seem to improve the tf700 with swap space due to the lack of RAM (1GB)..
Thanks for all the useful posts
Thanks for all the posts, I have my sd card on the way. I will post my experience when I get my sd card but I am sure it is safe to say there will be a benefit. I use linux to at home and have 8 gigs of ram on that computer, I lessen the swap after install to about 512mb because 8 gigs is more then enough. I leave some however just incase of any issues like ram going bad. On another computer in the house that has limited ram (1.5 gigs) I have enabled zram (384 mb) and added two old flash cards (1 gig each) to a pci raid card and those were converted to swap. I then altered the fstab to reflect the order of priority I wanted them used in. The reason is that when the swap is used from the hard drive, and the hard drive is being written to, can cause a slow down. So with the 2 flash cards at 1 gig each (the swap seen as 2 gigs) it seemed to speed it up. I just posted that because of the nix users and it seemed like a good plan to run it that way.
Ok, got the sd card
So I recieved the sd card today and applied the swap space to it using root swapper (max setting is 256mb, I figured i can find a way to increase it later if I need to). The defaut location in many of the swap applications will not work on this device however, the sd card mounts at /storage/sdcard1 in my case. So it has to be entered manually (might just be cyanogenmod). Also the device was picky when insalling the card, it would only say blank sd card or cannot read filesystem. I had to install the card in the dock, format it from cwm recovery, (vfat if I remember correct, ext2 and ntfs had issues, avoided ext3 and ext4 cause journaling will cause more wear and tear).
The sd card is a scandisk ultra sdhc uhs-1 8 gigs. From my research that is the fastest this tab can handle. I also use optimising programs like greenify (epic save everything app), pimp my rom (almost every tweak applied), and some pretty efficient tweaks in the settings as well. I also have HALO))) installed and working (epic multiwindow app that works with native programs and almost any rom).
The resuts:
I tested it many ways, I rebooted to see use (none was used because swap starts after boot), I opened apps normally (browsers and things), and it showed 9kb's was used. I then put it to the tests, I open four windows in halo, these were youtube, moonreader pro with a pdf ebook, lecturenotes (awsome note and handwriting app with tons of functions), and Supernote pro (not the best note app). Constantly switched between the apps and messed with settings with them open. The max of swap used was around 10mb(keeping in mind that when I switch windows the app(s) I leave get paused making it hard to tell actual usage because I had to swith the terminal and type "free". I then ran antutu bechmark and gpubench (my tab stills score pretty well) and got a little higher swap usage but not much.
As for the feel of it, it seemed to help when opening many windows in halo, this is the primary reason for my doing this. As for other more normal uses I really didnt see too much of a difference, I did test games however and they did seem a little better (could be placebo) but I am not really sure why they would except android cached other apps to free memory. Reopening apps seemed faster. Also because of apps like greenify my memory usage is decreased so I am sure typically swap would have seen more use.
The conclusion is that at this point I really didn't notice much of a boost for any normal use, but I will definately keep the swap space on due to the boost when using halo and not to mention that I will be updating to android 4.4 soon and it might need more memory. Swap at this point seems more like a pre emptive strike, but it does help with multitasking.
about swap
://androidforums.com/boost-mobile-warp-all-things-root/610449-ram-swapping-without-swapper2.html I actually followed a guide on android central and redid the swap file to 1 gig to swap instead of using a program, this worked better. (add http in front), when i disabled swap it was noticeable that there was a boost. then reenabled it this method.

RAM Expander Roehsoft not working on my tablet, how can i fix this?

Hello everyone,
I need some help with expanding RAM of an old android tablet of mine, more specifically, an Genesis GT-7204, using an SD card.
I rooted the tablet already and granted the app RAM Expander from Roehsoft root permissions, but when i try to use the app i get the following message: "This path is not available for swap!" Image below:
https://imgur.com/4MZ2l
The path i used was mnt/local:
https://imgur.com/6zUH7
Thanks in advance!
The images might be blocked, in any case i will post them here.
Personally have experienced that Virtual RAM ( aka SWAP RAM ) can only get created on a device's internal storage memory ( aka /sdcard ).
Hint: As path manually enter /data .
BTW:
Android since ever comes with virtual RAM ( SWAP RAM) feature. The internal storage memory used herefore is the /cache partition.
Also take note that an Android apps' memory usage by design is limited to some MBs. Even if you increase in Android's system file called build.prop the related amount, it's not sure that this is taken into account: an app's develeoper allows this or not.
And keep in mind that apps that did not fit in the RAM before without swap do not suddenly fit in the RAM.
Don't expect wonders using Roehsoft's RAM Expander. Probably you may not notice any gain in device's performance.
So i can only use my internal storage to add RAM? And not the SD card?
And to do this i have to manually set a path, but i am new at this, but i have to use /data or there is something else?
And in my case it is worth it, because this freaking tablet has only 500 MB of RAM!!!!!
jwoegerbauer said:
Personally have experienced that Virtual RAM ( aka SWAP RAM ) can only get created on a device's internal storage memory ( aka /sdcard ).
Hint: As path manually enter /data .
BTW:
Android since ever comes with virtual RAM ( SWAP RAM) feature. The internal storage memory used herefore is the /cache partition.
Also take note that an Android apps' memory usage by design is limited to some MBs. Even if you increase in Android's system file called build.prop the related amount, it's not sure that this is taken into account: an app's develeoper allows this or not.
And keep in mind that apps that did not fit in the RAM before without swap do not suddenly fit in the RAM.
Don't expect wonders using Roehsoft's RAM Expander. Probably you may not notice any gain in device's performance.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
So i can only use my internal storage to add RAM? And not the SD card?
And to do this i have to manually set a path, but i am new at this, but i have to use /data or there is something else?
And in my case it is worth it, because this freaking tablet has only 500 MB of RAM!!!!!
pprg1101 said:
So i can only use my internal storage to add RAM? And not the SD card?
And to do this i have to manually set a path, but i am new at this, but i have to use /data or there is something else?
And in my case it is worth it, because this freaking tablet has only 500 MB of RAM!!!!!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Honestly I never used Roehesoft's RAM Expander on a real Android device and I'll never will use it: In my eyes it's crap. And, you'll find no serious confirmations in the WEB that it works as claimed.
Android for good reason doesn't come with SWAP feature. Android's Memory Manager frees RAM if necessary.
It's on you to play around with Roehesoft's RAM Expander. Good luck.
My last 2 cents here:
SWAP is a place on the internal storage memory (usually a dedicated partition) that is used to store programs or data that can't fit in memory, like when a program grows more than the available RAM (BTW: In the world of Windows this space is called Swapfile.sys ). SWAP is way slower than RAM, so when you create / enable SWAP the phone gets slower, but at least the program can work.
All the stuff that can't or shouldn't stay in your RAM is written out to SWAP and read back in when needed. This means that the SWAP medium needs to be fast and resilient to lots of writes.
IMHO using an external SD card as SWAP fails on both counts. It is slower at reading/writing than a phone's internal drive, and each of its constituent sectors can only be written to a limited number of times before they wear out and can no longer reliably store data.
SC pl

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