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 <mailto: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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