swap on cf card with old laptop
 

Using an old PII panasonic with a bios ram limit of 192M and a slow hard drive. would it make sense to disable the hard disc swap an use a PCMCIA CF card reader with maby a 512M flash card set up as swap space? the extra ram in the laptop is either PC66 or PC100, would the flash card be faster than the ram and if so should i take out the extra ram (it has 64M built in)? might there be problems with hardware suspend/resume, application problems i can live with but system crashes... PII, its stable but you get to read every message that goes by at startup :)
thanks
stan

I'm not an expert on this, but here's my opinion.

First of all, RAM memory is much faster and more economical than anything else. So definitely keep all the physical RAM your system can handle. You might try checking to see if there's a bios upgrade available that will raise the RAM ceiling.

As for flash memory, it would almost certainly be faster than a hard disk swap drive (though it might depend on the performance of the buses and such), but you also have to remember that flash has a limited write-erase life cycle. Using it as extra memory on a low RAM system would tend to burn the stick out rather rapidly. This point has always made me wonder what M$ was thinking when it added the similar "RAM booster" ability to Vista. Still, if you're willing to handle the expense, it might be a good way to raise the maximum available memory on your system.

I have no idea how stable it would be though, or how it might affect the suspend functions or other things. You'd probably just have to experiment.

A hard disk swap drive may be slow, but it's probably the most dependable way to do it. Even better might be to put it on an external hard disk, perhaps a microdrive, so that the system doesn't have to use the same heads for data and swap writing.

thanks for the reply :)
living in france, a 512M card is 13 euro here:
http://www.rue-montgallet.com/
so with that and a reader for around 20 it wont break the bank to give it a try. a microdrive would be perfect, may even be faster through the pcmcia than the internal hard drive, just a shame there so expensive.
one thing mentioned in one of the links below (that i should have checked first, oops) was the usb, or pcmcia in this case, getting loaded after the swap is normaly turned on at boot so might have to put in a script to turn on the CF swap and turn off the HD swap after everything is running.
as for the standby, ill give it a try and see what happens. have another question posted about detecting hardware suspend, if that one can be worked out then another script could take care of any problems.
so will leave the ram where it is and get a card this weekend, post back next week with the results.
thanks again
stan

OK, so its a bit more than a week :)
Normaly with this laptop things start to slow down when kontact is open and there are around 5 web pages open in konqueror, then open something in abiword and it almost grinds to a complete stop.
At the moment there are 11 web pages open in konqueror, around half of them fairly heavy and using flash, kontact is open, kmldonkey is open, abiword is open and xmms is playing and not missing a beat.
Just opened a spreadsheet in openoffice too, it took around twice as long to open as it would on an empty session. Now it is up and running everything is responsive with nothing taking much more than a second to come up when switching desktops.
Some of the web pages are taking a little longer, less than 3 seconds to change tabs and the poxy flash animations are jumpy. Dont really care, flash is a waste of a good connection :)
Anyway, it works :) digital8doug, thanks for reminding me.

CF card is a sandisk 512MB, not sure what speed, I think its 4x

output 'free':
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 190800 187924 2876 0 2152 58728
-/+ buffers/cache: 127044 63756
Swap: 497972 200028 297944

note: had to add 'pci=usepirqmask' to the kernel commands in /boot/grub/menu.1st to get the pcmcia system to work. The kernel told me to do it. Thanks kernel.

Cheers
Stan

Quick note: Having a few errors with this, mainly with suspend and resume.
Just got a microdrive from fleabay, seagate 4gb st1. Bad idea, the drive is marked "embedded use only" and the damn thing wont work in a pcmcia cf card reader. Works fine as storage with a usb reader, apparently it is due to the firmware being locked as IDE only so it wont work as a CF card. Will start a new thread for it if I can find a way round this.
Cheers,
Stan