USB thumb drive as swap

There are howtos and scripts which lets you use a USB flash drive as swap partation. It is easy to do, make a normal swap partation, run swapon and make sure you do not remove the USB stick.

But do consider these facts:

hdparm -t -T on a random slower SATA harddrive are:

Timing buffered disk reads:  256 MB in  3.11 seconds =  82.42 MB/sec

And a 1 GB USB 2.0 drive:

Timing buffered disk reads:   58 MB in  3.09 seconds =  18.75 MB/sec

Yes. USB attached drives are mostly slower. Your numbers may vary, and good luck, but do note that it's a bad idea.