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