Can I use an external hard drive to speed up my laptop?

I'm sure this is a dumb newbie notion but wouldn't it be neat if someone came up with a portable usb expansion slot for RAM .

Digger

Small problem.......speed.
Even usb3 is limited to about 650MB/s.

Perhaps when usb6/7 comes out a plugin ram extension might function.

I can't say something like that won't happen, but it basically would be provided as yet another generation of PCs. All this boils down to the buss which connects everything, physically speaking at the component level. That in turn allows passage of data to flow and this is one of the stumbling blocks. What new cpus and gpus do is all they can "internally" in themselves and pass along on the buss to the next item that requires whatever. That makes it faster and ram is only a "switching center" of traveling data that morphs as the need arise. What you do to one side, sooner or later the other side will improve. Its easier to develop an I/C that plugs-in somewhere and provides much of the data crunching but its another to actually pass that data from one source to another, effectively real time passing of the data slows things down. That's why ram has gone from 1-density to 2-density and now 3-density modules, DDR, DDR2, DDR3. Video even is better DDR4 and DDR5 levels. the buss handles data is width sides from old 4-bit, 8-bit, 16-bit, etc. which offers whole solved data solutions rather smaller bits though that still continues. That has to be the case as the "ports" to outside world require slower speeds, unless equally attached to buss, reduced bottleneck hasn't changed. You can see improvement over time and reduced I/C as well doing more than ever.

Why, I recall fixing a HD with hammer and screwdriver/adj. tool, using a feeler gauge to gap the heads. These heads were as big as a watch face and about 2in. long. They also had to be "lapped" to have a flat face to reduce spacing for a better fit. I'm still amazed at flash drives holding 8-64gb of data in the palm of your hand.

tada -----Willy tube theory anyone?

never reach the speed of internal memory so the result would slow you down. Back in the day of the commodore 64 they had external memory module that plugged into special ports. But our computers are millions of times faster then they were in the 80's when Commodore was around.

Alot of systems today come with 16 gb or 32 gb of ram capability which is plenty. I upgrade my PC from 8 to 12 and I saw a performance jump immediately so I decided to go t0 16 gb. The jump from 12 to 16 wasn't even noticeable.