Dieter wrote:
I don't know how long flash cards would last as swap (they do wear out,
but they would be easy to replace).
You'd better look up the numbers and do the math. If you are wanting
solid state swap for better performance, you must be constantly
paging/swapping which is going to run up the number of writes
in a hurry. If you're *not* constantly paging/swapping, what's
wrong with a normal disk?
For this to fly, you need something which is faster than your disk and
cheaper than main memory RAM. IT would be best if it was as fast as the
fastest disks available for desktops -- 320 MB/s for SCSI.
I do see that they have ECC and
wear leveling which would help.
Without ECC plan on corrupted data.
Yes, you would have to use ECC flash cards or ECC RAID (RAID 2). You
could use other RAID but they can correct only if they know which bit
drive is bad.
I also noted the i-RAM PCI card: $160. Also rather expensive. However
RAM would probably be better for swap. This card uses up to four DDR
memory modules. Unless there is some type of less expensive RAM to use
in such a card, I don't see the point since it would probably cost about
the same as adding more RAM to your system.
The point would be if you have already maxed out main memory.
Yes, many mother boards have a 2GB or 4GB limit. You need a server
board to use a lot of memory.
Is there a cheaper type of
RAM to make something in the 2GB to 16GB range? Older types of memory
modules seem to be going up in price per bit. Probably isn't true of chips.
For 2 GiB can you just add main memory? I haven't priced memory recently,
but 2 years ago 2 GiB of ECC DDR400 was US$248 including shipping. That's
less than the engadget adapter you reference and I assume the adapter doesn't
include the flash. They make mainboards that can take lots of memory.
(Tyan for example.)
Yes, I don't see that point of that card.
See also: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/11/1424247
about using the GPU's memory as swap. (No, I don't know of any GPUs
with 2-16 GiB of memory.)
I assume you've already looked at your app to make sure it isn't
doing something stupid that wastes vast amounts of space.
With 1GB, my system works quite well using only a little swap unless you
do something that needs a lot of memory like working on a large image in
GIMP.
--
JRT
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