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
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