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

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.

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: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?

Re:Don't forget!

[karnal]

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

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!

Re:Don't forget!

[Arcane_Rhino]

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