To follow on from Naquaada's post, though not needed by the operating system itself, the ability to specify an external scratch disk is sometimes built in to certain memory intensive applications. Off the top of my head, Photoshop and Final Cut Pro both offer this feature.

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 Mac OS X 10.6.4 Retail || Intel Core2 Duo E8200 2.66GHz || Gigabyte G31M-ES2L || GeForce 6600 GT 128MB || Realtek ALC883 Audio || Realtek RTL8169 LAN || Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB HD || Sony Dual Layer IDE DVD RW DW-D22A || Apple Aluminium Keyboard || Mighty Mouse

 MacBook Pro || 2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo || 200Gb HD || 2Gb Ram || NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT

 iPhone 4 || 16Gb