[ILUG] Thoughts on USB as swap space

[Niall O Broin]

On 1 Jan 2008, at 12:25, Colm Buckley wrote:

> On 1/1/08, Frank Murphy <frankly3d.weblists at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Thinking on the other crowds MaleSheepSpeederUpper idea,
>> during install could a usb stick be designated as swap?
>> If so can you use up say the full 4gb or whatever size is involved?
>
> Theoretically, yes, but I'd be inclined to think of this as a bad  
> idea in
> practice - most flash memory has a limited number of write cycles  
> it can
> handle before effectively "wearing out".  The limit has been  
> increasing
> rapidly recently, especially on SSD devices which are intended to  
> replace
> hard drives, but the cheaper flash memory you tend to find in USB  
> drives
> will usually only cope with a few tens of thousands of writes to  
> each block
> before that block becomes unusable.  Some drives have "hardware write
> levelling", which uses an indirection table to evenly distribute  
> the write
> across the blocks of the device; this helps but doesn't fix the  
> problem
> entirely.  In general, swap would probably be the least suitable  
> use for
> flash devices, unless it's very lightly-used.

What Colm said, in spades But also, you specifically mentioned  
"during install". On anything like a modern machine you should have  
more than enough memory to do an install without needing swap (during  
the install, that is).



Niall