I've got an E02 that's currently running Arch from a USB thumb drive. A couple of the daily jobs running on the box require swap. At the moment I'm using a swapfile but as I understand it running a swapfile on a USB thumb drive can kill the drive quickly.
Does anyone know anything about running swap on the NAND? I don't really know what NAND is so are there any issues with using that type of memory for swap? If I make /dev/mtd3 a swap partition will that break anything the default uboot needs? I'd like to keep the default behavior in case something ever goes wrong with my Arch installation and I need to fall back to the default kernel.
Another thought I had was get a small usb thumb drive just for swap and consider replacing it from time to time as an operating cost. At least that way I don't kill the entire OS if the drive dies prematurely. Still if the on-board NAND is safe to use I'd obviously prefer that approach.
Also the jobs sometimes need up to 200MB of swap so the setup would involve NAND as high priory and a swapfile on the USB drive as low priority. So no matter what I will still need to hit the USB drive occasionally. The implication being that if thumb drives handle swap usage terribly then maybe even using the NAND won't provide sufficient protection for my USB drive? If that's the case then maybe using a dedicated thumb drive is the only way to go anyway.
Any thoughts from people with experience in this sort of thing?
Does anyone know anything about running swap on the NAND? I don't really know what NAND is so are there any issues with using that type of memory for swap? If I make /dev/mtd3 a swap partition will that break anything the default uboot needs? I'd like to keep the default behavior in case something ever goes wrong with my Arch installation and I need to fall back to the default kernel.
Another thought I had was get a small usb thumb drive just for swap and consider replacing it from time to time as an operating cost. At least that way I don't kill the entire OS if the drive dies prematurely. Still if the on-board NAND is safe to use I'd obviously prefer that approach.
Also the jobs sometimes need up to 200MB of swap so the setup would involve NAND as high priory and a swapfile on the USB drive as low priority. So no matter what I will still need to hit the USB drive occasionally. The implication being that if thumb drives handle swap usage terribly then maybe even using the NAND won't provide sufficient protection for my USB drive? If that's the case then maybe using a dedicated thumb drive is the only way to go anyway.
Any thoughts from people with experience in this sort of thing?