smartphone as a USB ramdisk

Question

Is it possible to use an Android device (like a smartphone) as an USB ramdisk?

Basically i'd like to have the PC accessing a tmpfs on the smartphone as a (virtual) USB mass storage device, so data gets written on the smartphone RAM instead of the flash memory.

This could have many use cases:

emergency swap space for PCs with low RAM
temporary storage for privacy sensitive-data
fast storage for temporary files (alternative to a native ramdisk wasting PC RAM)
PC USB interface benchmarking

if you think you can do it, just embed your android storage onto the pc: but note: if you use usb (currently usb 3.1 supports only 10gibs minus bad transfer,....), I don't expect you have an USB 3.1 android phone and a corresponding pc, so your theoretical maximal data rate would be 60mbps, which is slower than most hard drives. — Schwertspize, Aug 30 '15 at 06:30
It still looks interesting to me despite the USB 2.0 bottleneck. Side note: i've found this commercial app that could do the trick by mounting /tmp. I'm going to try it asap. — eadmaster, Aug 30 '15 at 06:41
by the way there is also a free version.... https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=os.devwom.usbsharereval — Schwertspize, Aug 30 '15 at 07:53
I wouldn't do it as the data rate is far more slower then RAM speed. — ThomasG, Aug 30 '15 at 17:30

score 1 · Answer 1 · answered Aug 31 '15 at 04:33

USB Share does the trick by creating a virtual usb image in /mnt/secure (which is mounted as tmpfs on my Android 4.2 OS). Then, mount and share the image with RW permissions.

Side note: i've found my OS also mounts a tmpfs on /sdcard/.android_secure but when connected as USB mass storage the files get written on the flash memory instead of the tmpfs.

If you know a better solution not requiring any commercial app please let me know!

smartphone as a USB ramdisk

1 Answers1