Yes, i understand swapping far more than I'd like to, honestly. The point was not to add swap space on a normal hard drive, but on something that was composed of SDRAM or Flash. These have no rotational latency nor time for the head to seek, though you'd still be going through the IDE interface which would be slower.

Flash disks are available now, basicaly a compact flash card with an IDE interface. A search on google failed to turn up a drive using ram as the storage medium, so it's possible I was halucinating on that one, but I know it's not an orginal idea, so maybe i'm just not searching for the right terms.