Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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?"

3 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Don't forget! by p2sam · · Score: 2, Insightful

    careful... who knows what kinds of metal or other toxic material could be in those chips. You sure you want to be touching it regularly?

  2. Hand-me-downs by HunterZ · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I find a friend or family member with an old computer and give them a bit of an upgrade. I recently found some extra PC100 SDRAM laying around and put it in my mom's computer the last time I visited.

    --
    Arguing about vi versus Emacs is like arguing whether it's better to make fire by rubbing sticks or banging rocks.
  3. Battery backed SDRAM? by anthony_dipierro · · Score: 2, Insightful

    It's usually not much of a problem to find motherboards and power supplies to go along with your ram. The problem really becomes energy consumption. Yeah, you can take out the drives (and everything else), and leave just the mobo, power supply, fan, and memory, but that's still going to eat up too much power unless you've got a good use for the extra ram.

    I got to thinking after reading this: what about using a battery-backed SDRAM module? This way you could keep the computer off, but the data would stay in ram. I'm not really sure how useful it'd be in itself, but apparently these things come as PCI cards so maybe they'll help. Here are some links I found in a quick google search: http://www.bentech-taiwan.com/memory_board.htm, http://www.vita.com/vmeprod/pmc/pmcmemory.shtml

    Anyway, for most purposes I think just using a regular old motherboard will do. The issue is can you find a use for the ram which is more valuable than the cost of the electricity? For smaller bits of ram, I'm not so sure about that.