swap file

[Jon M. Hanson]

Michael Havens wrote:
> I had a stroke of genius! (you are going to be proud of me for thinking of 
> this). This idea has been mulling around in my head for a while now. Wouldn't 
> it be lightning quick to put a swap file on a pendrive? No disk activity 
> would be needed at all! It would all have to do with the bus's speed.
>
> Okay, I looked into doing this a while ago and was wondering if things had 
> changed.
> -1- touch <file>
> -2- mkswap <file>
> -3- swapon <file>(max file size in bytes>
> -4- add '<file> swap swap noauto 0 0' to /etc/fstab
>
> what are the drawbacks to doing this? how could I automate this?
>
>
> man! why do most computers even have hard drives! Unless you are running a 
> business.....
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>   
    The problem is that flash drives are fast at reading but an order of
magnitude slower at writing. Also flash drive cells have a limited
number of write cycles before they go bad. Some flash drives are smart
so that they rotate around where they write to even out which cells are
written to but they will eventually go bad and the size of your flash
drive will slowly shrink.
    Microsoft Vista has a similar feature where you can plug in a flash
drive and it extends memory. I would think it would mean swap space
since even though flash drives are fast for reading they are no where
near the speed of the memory on the front-side bus.


-- 
Jon M. Hanson (N7ZVJ)
Homepage:  http://the-hansons-az.net
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