Other Help Topics :: running damn small from ram

Your best solution is:

dsl in toram mode + activated linux swap partition

or

dsl in toram mode + activated DOS swap file

The toram part will increase performance dramatically and the swap will prevent your computer from crashing if you hit the RAM limit. Instead of crashing, it will just swap out some infrequently used part of memory to your disk drive.

Guessing that if you use a USB (2) drive to get DSL into ram with toram, and then have a swap partition on USB rather than on a harddrive, this would be the fastest at the moment? So load DSL toram from USB2, have a swap on USB2, and use a harddrive for storage of files (unless you have a huge USB drive, or course...).
Just that USB2 drives are getting pretty cheap for 128MB ones (ie. Aus$30-40), thinking about getting one as a permanent DSL-only system core....

NEVER install a swap file or swap partition to a flash-based memory device like a USB thumb drive.

Flash memory has a limited number of "writes" to it before it will fail and swap files/partitions will quickly wear out your flash device.

Now if you have a USB2 external hard drive, it is OK to use it for swap purposes.

original here.