On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 2:21 PM, Mikus Grinbergs <mi...@bga.com> wrote: >> Downsides >> - Increased SD card wear > > For about two years now, I've been defining a swap partition on the > (external) "permanent" SD card I use with my XO-1 systems. So far, I > have never experienced any problems with that setup.
A couple of points: a) wear lifetime is statistical, so one report does not equal a guarantee b) wear lifetime is roughly proportional to SD card size, so if you're using a largish card your report is not applicable to smallish card users (you didn't say how large your card was) c) life expectancy of the XO-1 is 5 years (you provided a report after 2) It's not too hard to actually write enough to an SD card to wear it out. For one 4GB card I tested, about 5TB of writes is enough; wad's got equivalent numbers for all of the flash technologies OLPC has tested. To advance the discussion, collecting a quantitative measure of "average swap writes per day" given some usage profile would let you more-or-less rigorously determine whether swap was 'safe' over the 5 year expected lifetime of the device. If you started collecting/recording total data written to your swap partition, I'd be very interested to hear (in a month or so) what your numbers were. --scott -- ( http://cscott.net/ ) _______________________________________________ Devel mailing list Devel@lists.laptop.org http://lists.laptop.org/listinfo/devel
