I could see it used as swap, which would be quite nice since flash doesn't have any moving parts. One thing I would worry about is the quality of flash, as it degrades after a number of reads/writes, though I have no idea of the figures.

Yeah someone did mention the read/writes issue last night on IRC when I mentioned this idea... If it would really degrade the flash drive permanently then I'd probably rather not use it as swap. It's better to last longer for its real purpose.

Has anyone tried this?

USB has slower access times than IDE/ATA/SATA, it would only slow your system up more. Also as dylunio and chaddy pointed out.. they are not ment for such a heavy task.

This only makes sense in a diskless computer (using flash instead of a disk). You see, a 1GB flash stick is at least about 5$, while a disk can be 1$/GB, doesn't wear as fast, and is much faster.

If you are thinking about building a diskless computer, I recommend that you put LOTS of RAM in it because you will want to put parts of the file tree that are changed a lot in RAMdisks, to make the flash last longer.

I'm not thinking of building a diskless computer.. Anyway, I guess I wont try this then.

Thanks

This can be used kinda in Windows Vista...I love Vista though! It is called SuperFetch from what I remember...check it out here at Wikipedia...and yes I know Wikipedia is edited and is becoming more and more efficient...but I still love it - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superfetch