On Fri, May 18, 2012 at 12:00:16AM +0100, JR van Rensburg wrote:
> On Fri, 2012-05-18 at 00:33 +0200, Charles ELSAESSER WebmailOrange
> wrote:
> > Due probably to USB local-network addresses order,
> >    or perhaps to some other insufficiant USB media management,
> >    if your target install media is an USB key, it is farmore better to
> > locate the swap partition on the same physical media. 
> 
> Just beware - usb keys were not designed to take multiple read writes
> and will eventually fail. So it is not best practice to have a swap on
> the key


I confirm this. I tested many brands of USB keys, they all failed quickly (died
completely, corrupted the Linux filesystems or randomly go into a read-only mode).

Except for the "Patriot Rage XT" brand 8GB and 16GB which work without any problems.

We have maybe a dozen systems running from them for more than a year
with no failures. If in doubt, you can RAID-1 them in pairs.

To confirm the previous poster - there is no swap and disk i/o is minimal (only OS use).

And these are USB2 units. I have tried several USB3 units, they all failed (dead-dead)
within a few days. (I confirm that USB3 read is much faster 60M/s vs 20-30M/s for USB2,
but writes are about the same speed 20M/s - as fast as the flash memory chips can go, I guess).


-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada