swap space

[stu]

On Tuesday 29 January 2008 3:24 pm, Jon M. Hanson wrote:
> On Tue, Jan 29, 2008 at 01:17:05PM -0700, Michael Havens wrote:
> > I want to make use of my floppy disk; thus I wish to use it as my swap
> > space. How many bytes
> >
> > I was wondering.... a flopy drive is very much useless. Why not use it as
> > the swap space?  If we were going to how many bytes/blocks are in a
> > floppy? ---------------------------------------------------
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> That's an extrodinarily bad idea. Your floppy drive is many times slower
> than a hard drive (where swap is normally kept). It also doesn't have
> nearly enough capacity to make it worth while as a swap device (even the
> "super capacity" drive, which may or may not work in Linux). The
> rule-of-thumb is that your swap space should be twice the amount of your
> physical RAM (more than 2 GB is overkill). Also if you eject your swap
> floppy and the kernel tries to swap something out you're looking at a
> kernel panic.

	Not to mention than floppys are notoriously undependable. I have lost more 
data on floppys than I have on any other medium. Not what I would want for 
something as critical as swap space.