lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[Goh Lip <g.lip@xxxxxxx>]

On 05/08/2010 05:02 PM, C David Rigby wrote:
> On Saturday 08,May,2010 04:53 PM, Goh Lip wrote:


> Hello Goh Lip,
>
> I was planning on doing this at some stage (I just installed Lubuntu to
> my laptop in a separate partition and I am reading up on update-grub
> right now).
>
> I've read that one should NOT allocated a swap space on a USB flash
> device due to the limited number of re-writes that flash media can
> support before it degrades. Do you concur with this? Would an "Install
> to USB" how-to be a useful addition to our wiki?

David, that was fast!
I am not a good source for swap and 'swappiness' but from what I know, 
and others please correct me if I am wrong, the following points hold

o when installing an OS to usb drive, the desktop hard drive swap is 
enabled at the fstab of the usb OS as well. (I verified this). In other 
words, when using the usb OS at the desktop where it was installed, the 
swap is automatically enabled due to the presence of the fstab entry, 
(unless of course the uuid is changed)

o For many cases for new computers, the swap is usually zero or close to 
zero, ie, no need for swap unless extremely high stress applications is 
run (or more usually, before adobe flash crashes your firefox :)  ). The 
'newer' uses for swap is for hibernation and sleep and this requires a 
slightly more memory than your ram memory.

o Yes, rewrites will degrade flash and hard drive memory but I think it 
will require 'petazillions' to do that now that most home users will 
have no need to worry about that.

Having said that, what should you do? Actually, I don't know.  ;)
But I'll you what I did. With hard drive memory so much now, I allocate 
a more than enough to my hard drive swap. 2.5 x ram.
But my flash? Zilch! And I don't lose any sleep over it.

Hope that helps, David.