[mythtv-users] USB Flash Memory for boot/system. What is fast enough?

Brian Wood beww at beww.org
Mon Nov 23 15:29:12 UTC 2009


On Monday 23 November 2009 08:08:32 Richard Morton wrote:
> > In addition to using the "noatime" mounting option, you also want to make
> > sure you are not swapping to partition on a flash device.
>
> ok, thanks.
>
> I am using a 4GB Bytestor drive with no problems knows (occasional
> lockup of mythfrontend, not sure of the cause yet).
>
> my fstab has a swap entry onto the USB drive:
> # swap was on /dev/sda5 during installation
> UUID=0782c3c7-23a6-4149-89fc-696673f55b83 none            swap
> sw,noatime              0       0
>
> if this is not the done thing, what should it look like; what device/what
> fs?

The best solution is to not have a swap file or partition on a flash device at 
all. Depending on how much RAM you have, and what you are doing, you may be 
able to get along without any swap at all. That's what I am doing with my 
flash-based Debian system.

I'm not sure what the noatime parameter would do with a swap partition, it's 
intended to eliminate writing the access time each time a file is accessed on 
a normal file system, but swap is not handled as a normal filesystem.

If it's not causing any problems it certainly couldn't hurt, but I would try 
to get swap off a flash device, either by eliminating it entirely if you can, 
or writing it to a standard HDD partition, or even use an NFS-mounted file.

Swap can be enabled on either a partition or a file, as you probably know.

Perhaps someone with a better understanding of how the kernel handles swap 
will have better suggestions?

-- 
Brian Wood
beww at beww.org


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