lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[Phillip Whiteside <phillw@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi,
 with regards to the degradation, if you are using persistance, then you
will be re-writing to the usb (albeit not as frequently). My advice to
people installing to usb is always to get a usb stick that is certified for
Vista or Win 7 as 'Readyboost', these devices are both faster than
'unbranded' usb sticks & are designed specifically for memory swapping.
(It's really odd to be recommending something that Microsoft do, but I
happily accept that there is an accreditation scheme for usb memory sticks).
These sticks are slightly more expensive than the 'unbranded' ones, but are
worth it for those who value their data (as we all do).

Regards,
Phill.



On Sat, May 8, 2010 at 10:34 AM, C David Rigby <c.david.rigby@xxxxxxxxx>wrote:

> On Saturday 08,May,2010 05:27 PM, Goh Lip wrote:
>
>> 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.
>>
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> I assumed that if I do a manual partitioning of the USB flash drive's
> storage, I could simply skip allocating swap. The result would be that there
> would be no fstab entry for swap. I'll try it and find out at some point.
>
> I agree with you that my laptop w/ 2 GB RAM is probably not going to need
> swap with reasonable desktop usage under Lubuntu. My test system back in
> Singapore w/ 256 MB RAM would probably need it once I have mail, web
> browser, and a few other apps running.
>
> Thanks Goh Lip. Cheers, David
>
>
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