I'd like to share some experience with all the forum. When I started playing with ALARM, I did not really need the swap, but I've created one anyway just for testing. I did not have a hard drive always connected so I've created one on the flash drive. This is a very BAD idea, as written on the instructions and basically on any post about the argument or where someone is saying that his swap is on the flash drive. As already mentioned many times, the problem is the limited number of write cycles of flash memories. If it's likely you are not going to have problems copying files on your portable flash drive, the continuos writing activity of the swapping can easily kill the flash. Back to the story, I had no problem on some good quality and low usage pogoplug (basically the swap is never touched), but one cheap flash memory died. I was using ALARM to control a camera for a timelapse and imagemagick was processing one image out of ten, requiring the swap to complete the job. After three timelapses of 7 hours each, the flash memory did not start at all for the fourth one. I'm glad that it did not died during one. It wasn't easy to realize that the problem was the memory and not something else, I was really pissed, but it was my fault. The memory is really dead, I did not even blink, and the pogoplug did not realize that something has been connected (same behavior on my laptop).
Browsing around, I found a microdrive, basically a 1-inch hard drive with a USB interface. Those microdrives were used a while ago for portable MP3 players and with a compact flash interface. Max capacity 8GB.
Do you think that I'm ok using them for the system plus swap?
Many thanks for sharing your opinion and beware where you put your swap
