Using USB flash as swap space.

[Ray Parrish]

Fred Roller wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-08-03 at 15:53 -0400, Fred Roller wrote:
>   
>>>> Hello,
>>>>
>>>> I recently read an article that states that using a USB flash
>>>>         
>> drive
>>     
>>> as 
>>>       
>>>> swap space can help speed up a low memory system since the flash
>>>>         
>>> drive 
>>>       
>>>> is faster than a hard drive.
>>>>         
>>> Do you have a reference of said article?
>>> When and where was it published?
>>>  
>>> Thanks
>>>   Siggy
>>>       
>> He's right.  Flash wears out from write operations and though it does
>> make for a decent swap just be prepared for it to wear out.  With
>> heavy
>> use the studies have shown about an 8 month life span.  I will see if
>> I
>> can dig up the articles for this information, it's been a while.
>>
>>     
>
> apologies, replying to:
>
> I am no expert on this but I thought that flash may be fast reading
> but is slow on write, much slower than a hard drive.
> Also I believe flash wears out after a certain number of write
> operations so I would not have thought its use as swap would be
> appropriate.
>
> Colin
>   
That was before they changed the way they get erased. The lag in a write 
operations is due to having to first erase an entire block of memory on 
the drive before writing to it. Now they leave the erasing to be done 
after the write operations, which speeds things up.

See

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_Drive#Architecture_and_function>

for more information on how they do that.

Later, Ray Parrish


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