usb stick as swap partition

[Wolfgang Gill]

On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 20:02:42 -0500, W. Guy Thomas wrote
> I have researched this but it seems no one wants to do this.
> Is it a bad idea?
> I think it would be better than my little hard drive churning on this
> old laptop.
> A full 128MB stick. 
> Fedora sees the stick, I create a partition in fdisk of type 82.
> I use 
> dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda1 bs=1024 count=131000
> 
> then /sbin/mkswap /dev/sda1
> 
> this takes a while, then it's done.
> 
> but if I try to "swapon" /dev/sda1:
> 
> "resource busy".
> 
> any tips?
> 
> I just want to cut down on the thrashing of my hard drive and if 
> this is slower, then fine, at least I can do other things since my 
> hard drive won't be churning away.
> 
> Thanks for any further info!
> 
> =G

I wouldn't recommend it for several reasons:

1. It's way slower that HDD access.
2. It's also slower than main memory.
3. It doesn't like constant access (Hence the resourse busy errors).
4. It's not designed for that purpose.

Wolf
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