On 2006-03-05 acruhl@gmail.com wrote:
> On 3/5/06, Peter Kwan <peterkwan@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > It has been said that installing a swap partition on a compact flash card
> > (cf card) will shorten its useful life substantially.
> >
> > With "life-long" guarantee of modern cf cards, does the above statement
> > still holds. Indeed, what are the grounds for the above statement?
> > Naturally, this seems also affect one's choice in using a mirco-drive or a
> > cf card if a swap partition is necessary. Much obliged if someone could
> > enlighten me in this "hardware" area. Thanks.

  IMO, it is still too low to risk use of swap.

> I made the decision based on the price of the card. It's not that
> much. I've been using a swap partition on my CF card since I got it.
> It's probably got 40 or 50 hours of use on it, with no problems. I
> don't care if it shortens life, in other words.

  Note, however, that that current file systems do not seem to have any
means of detecting silent disk corruption other than basic metadata
consistancy, mostly during fsck.  I don't think CF cards will overwite
existing data, but you could make it difficult to recover that data before
you realize anything is wrong.  A block verifying layer or verifying file
system that detects and the damage early would be very useful for CF.

Matthew Orgass
darkstar@city-net.com