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.
Colm
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