Ruining you RS MMC card with swap

[ZeroTolerance]

It is a well known fact that flash memory has a limited amout of cyles that can be written to it. By make a swap file or partition, you are using the flash very heavily. This being said, you can potentialy kill your RS MMC card by creating swap on it. Isn't anybody worried about this? I read a lot of threads here and once in a while somebody will bring up this fact but nobody addresses it. Why? This should be an important consideration when deciding to make some swap space. Who wants to drop 50-70USD on a RS MMC only to kill it some time latter?

[uNtouched]

Me because the card I have has 1 Million read/writes and a 5 year warranty. I figure don't worry, just enjoy.

[Simon]

I figure the increase in performance is well worth the risk. I figure if the card ever dies the price of them will have dropped and there will hopefully be higher capacity cards around. I believe the cards themselves manager the writes such that it spreads them around so it isn't constantly writing the same bit over and over again.

I found this via Wiki which explains the wear levelling in flash memory. I don't know if this applies to the RS-MMC cards we use though? I hope so since I have a 1GB Sandisk !

http://www.sandisk.com/Assets/File/OEM/WhitePapersAndBrochures/RS-MMC/WPaperWearLevelv1.0.pdf

[jayholler]

yeah, i feel the same as the two posters above. the performance increase for using multiple apps at once is worth the shorter life of the card. especially sice the bookmarks are a seperate app, and it seems to really get bogged down as you add more and more bookmarks. by the time it dies we can get higher capacities at lower prices. we'll all have to report back as our cards die. plus, you can switch the swap on and off as needed, so it doesn't always have to be on. i got my 1gb card from amazon for $50usd, so i'm not really worried about paying for a new one down the road. i do use the extrootfs created by wolfram, so when the card dies i'll have to start from scratch, but it increases the life of the onboard memory, so again, well worth the cost as almost nothing is writing to the internal memory. my $.02