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What Can You Do with Old RAM?

Posted by Cliff on from the dips-for-chips dept.

sruchris asks: "Over the past 10 years or so, as friends and relatives buy new computers, I end up with the spare parts that they don't want. I've now have quite the collection of unused PC100 and PC133 SDRAM. Does anyone have any practical or creative uses for spare SDRAM other than giving it away? I have various sizes from 32MB to 256MB. My first thought was a giant RAM drive. Does anyone know of an adapter that would take, lets say, 10 sticks of SDRAM and give me an IDE or USB connector? I know people have made jewelery, fishtanks, litterboxes and furniture out of old computers parts, but what can we do that's pratical with a box full of old RAM?"

6 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Gigabyte's i-RAM by jgaynor · · Score: 3, Informative


    Try Gigabyte's i-RAM:

    Anandtech Review

    4 slot, PCI, makes a great swap file drive for pshop or premiere.

  2. Give them to me (or sell them) by oldosadmin · · Score: 4, Informative

    I'd say to give them to someone who might use them (like me), or to sell them on ebay. Some people still use that type of ram.

    --
    Jay | http://oldos.org
    1. Re:Give them to me (or sell them) by MrResistor · · Score: 3, Informative

      That's probably the best suggestion.

      Remember that this stuff wasn't just used in desktop PCs, but also in a wide variety of special purpose systems. For example, I used to repair video servers, which were basically a PC with a crapload of custom hardware, and each one uses a bare minimum of 5 72-pin simms (max 11, IIRC). There are hundreds of these things still chugging along doing their jobs quite nicely, keeping broadcasters like DirecTV going, despite the fact that some of them are old enough to be running NT3 on a 486.

      Somebody has a use for them, and you might as well collect a little beer money from it.

      That said, the ramdrive idea is cool, but it get's mentioned every year or so and there don't seem to be many of them out there, especially ones that use older form factors. If I had the know-how, though, I'd make one. I'm not convinced it's as unreasonable as some around here would have us believe.

      --
      Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
  3. Re:Gigabyte's i-RAM - DDR ONLY :( by jgaynor · · Score: 3, Informative

    I take it back - the i-RAM is DDR only :(. Still useful for those with extra memory though.

  4. freecycle by dr_leviathan · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.freecycle.org/ -- basically a local free exchange of stuff that you would otherwise throw away

    I found that via an old entry on http://www.makezine.org/blog/.

    There have times where I wished I had some older memory to fill out an old liquidated machine I was resurrecting, but I've always had spares of the smaller sized memory cards while wishing I had the larger capacity cards. That is and abundance of 128 MB cards that I would like to trade ALL for just one 256 MB card. The low end stuff of any generation of memory cards is basically useless in my experience.

    Anybody want some 128 MB PC100 cards?

    --
    Religion is poison to rationality, and we lose sight of that at our own peril. -- Lurker2288
  5. Re:Don't forget! by Arcane_Rhino · · Score: 3, Informative

    Yes. It is always best to go to a professional.