Re: nifty swapspace trick

I don't know anything about SATA drive numbers but I do know that flash
has a limited life span. According to Wikipedia most flash drives can
take 100,000 writes. After that there are no guarantees.

100,000 writes may sound like a lot but not the way Linux does things.
I'm a little fuzzy on the details but here's what I know. Evey time
Linux reads a file it also writes something back. I think it has
something to do with date and time info. I'm not sure this applies to
swap but if it does your going to kill that flash drive a lot sooner
then you think.

If any of the above info isn't correct just let me know. I'm a little
fuzzy on the read and write stuff.

Jamie Hushower wrote:
> A "typical" flash drive will not exceed the read/write speed of
> a "typical" SATA drive. The theoretical *maximum* of a flash drive on USB
> 2.0 is 60MB/s, but I suspect 30MB/s is more realistic for typical drives.
> A typical 7200rpm SATA drive might average 45MB/s. If you have relatively
> low disk I/O (though high RAM usage) to begin with, you might be losing
> speed by using a flash drive for swap space. I'm curious what Microsoft
> has to say on the matter, but am too lazy to look it up. Can anyone offer
> better numbers than I have or refute it?
>
> -Jamie
>
> __
> Jamie Hushower
> Rent-A-Geek
> http://alaska-geeks.com
> 223-9136
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: bryanm@acsalaska.net
> To: aklug@aklug.org
> Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 02:43:33 -0800 (AKDT)
> Subject: nifty swapspace trick
>
>
>> I don't know if this is common knowledge or not, but I had
>> never heard of the idea before.
>>
>> While listening in on my boss teaching a computer class, I
>> heard him mention that Windows Vista has a new feature that
>> allows you to use a flash drive as virtual memory. Since
>> USB (and especially USB 2.0) runs faster than a hard drive,
>> a flash drive is an easy way to boost your memory performance.
>>
>> After rolling the idea around in my head a bit, I decided that
>> it might be easy to do the same thing in Linux using common
>> built-in tools. I had to try it to be sure, but it works!
>>
>> All you have to do is:
>> 1) plug in the flash drive and get the system to recognize it
>> 2) run mkswap to quickly format it
>> 3) run swapon to start using it
>>
>> Running 'free' will show you that you have extra memory available.
>>
>> --
>> Bryan Medsker
>> bryanm@acsalaska.net
>>
>>
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Received on Mon Oct 29 12:04:40 2007