What Can You Do with Old RAM?

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?"

Comments

Don't forget!

[Mad_Rain]

Keychains! Lots and Lots of keychains!

Re:Don't forget!

[p2sam]

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?

Re:Don't forget!

[karnal]

My parents told me the same thing about my pee-pee.

Re:Don't forget!

[bhiestand]

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?

My parents told me the same thing about my pee-pee.

That's why I hire someone to handle mine for me.

Re:Don't forget!

[Arcane_Rhino]

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

Obvious

[c0d3h4x0r]

but what can we do that's pratical with a box full of old RAM?

You can post it as an "Ask Slashdot" and get your five minutes of geek fame!

Gigabyte's i-RAM

[jgaynor]

Try Gigabyte's i-RAM:

Anandtech Review

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

Re:Gigabyte's i-RAM

[Anti_Climax]

I've only found 1 website selling these and it's a lot pricier than the original reviews lead on. Apparently there's only been 1 run of about 2000. Here's hoping for more.

Give them to me (or sell them)

[oldosadmin]

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.

Re:Give them to me (or sell them)

[N3Roaster]

Yes, this kind of RAM is still new enough to be useful. Check out your local charities. Perhaps you have a local Tech Corps taking donated computers and turning them into computer labs for K-12 schools. It isn't uncommon for donated computers to have a pathetic amount of RAM installed or even for them to show up stripped, and a network server can always use a little more RAM. The worst case scenario is you get a tax writeoff and the charity properly disposes of the RAM.

Re:Give them to me (or sell them)

[MrResistor]

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.

Re:Gigabyte's i-RAM - DDR ONLY :(

[jgaynor]

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

Any toxins in em?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know but right know I am in the process of installing as many old wiped drives, pci cards and ram into one box as I can. I'm going to try to jam a few motherboards in there right before I seal it up. Then I am going to take it to the recycling center and let them deal with it. For the $8 charge per box, they are going to get about 8 drives, 20 sticks of ram (most of it taped inside of the case), 8 pci cards, some floppy and cd drives, and hopefully a couple of extra motherboards. It's going to be wall to wall components in there.

Re:Any toxins in em?

[planetoid]

Yeah, Windows is for people -- the same people who think Thomas Kinkade and Tom Clancy are the best things to happen to their living rooms and the fine arts, and spend a quarter of their income on tickets to Wrestlemania events.

Re:Well...

[Darth_Burrito]

Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit taking other people's old ram.

freecycle

[dr_leviathan]

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?

Give them to me

[dtfinch]

Then I'd feel comfortable discarding my large pile of 4-16mb SIMMs.

Wanna sell some of it?

[unitron]

I'm in the market for 256 MB PC100 sticks (or PC133 if it'll work in old BX chipset boards), or maybe even 128 sticks if really cheap.

You can email me at coastalnet.com

Send PC100 RAM to us... We still use it!

[Anonymous Coward]

We continue to build up SME Server based systems,
  like the one we put into a returned soldiers'
  rehab centre in South Australia, cost-free.

  We've got some Compaq Deskpro's that work fine
  in that application... they take PC100 SDRAM.

  Adding more RAM makes our servers go faster;
  each of these boxes have room for 3 RAM modules.

  If you were going to dump them, dump them here:

        GPO Box 222, Adelaide 5001, AUSTRALIA

  TIA :-)

Donate them to a school

[jcaplan]

I work at a school as a computer teacher and tech support person. I have essentially no budget and I scrounge what I can. A bunch of 32MB PC100 or larger DIMMS (or SIMMS for that matter) would be put to great use. Remember corportate users upgrade much more frequently than schools do. I have a long list of machines that need more RAM. If you don't want to send them to me, check with local schools - they might be delighted for some extra RAM. Just make sure you talk to the right folks.

The lack of budget isn't all bad. It allows be to have a persuasive arguments for setting up a SAMBA file server (headless 200MHz Pentium, 96 MB RAM, 4GB storage and heavily used) as well as Open Office, the GIMP, Blender, Audacity, etc!

(Those interested in sending old RAM my way may contact me at: kittyspam a t comcast d o t net. Don't drop the word spam from the address.)

Thanks very much,
Jon

PS I also can make use of 20GB+ hard drives!

Hand-me-downs

[HunterZ]

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.

LTSP

[darnok]

Build a Linux Terminal Server box, get a bunch of crappy old PCs that everyone throws out, fill them with your RAM - every one (or every room!) in the house gets a PC.

I dream of the day I have a toilet PC, but there's still a few logistical challenges to work out (e.g. mounting the screen behind the door, storing the optical mouse somewhere, choice of keyboard), as well as the all important "Can I find a printer that prints on a roll of toilet paper?". You may laugh, but once I've got mine, everyone's gonna want one!

Sell on Allegro.

[SharpFang]

allegro.pl
In Poland, 128, 256, 512M SDRAMs run at prices high enough to exchange them for DDR400 equivalents with lifetime warranty.
These chips are what allows older computers - P2, P3 - to run smoothly and be usable in modern world. Used computer salesmen battle for them - because P3 600MHZ with 512M RAM will run faster than P4 2GHZ with 128M - which still is a common config available from retailers. Giving more RAM to the old boxes gives them a new lease of life and allows them to serve poorer people for many years. You can have such a computer, complete set, for $30, $50 - and it's more than enough for websurfing and home office, accounting etc. Only games require more.

Battery backed SDRAM?

[anthony_dipierro]

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.