Due to the default swapiness settings and the slow speed of flash memory, virtual memory on these devices tends to be more useful in avoiding crashes in high memory-usage situations than effecting general speedups (as might be seen on a desktop PC). So, if you tend to multitask a lot, then definitely enable it, if not, then I'd still recommend enabling it. The only real harm that can come of it is a hard-to-dismount internal card (that's what scp/sftp and the external card are for, anyway ), and, potentially (in rare cases), some system flakiness if the internal card becomes corrupted (it usually doesn't manifest itself in that manner, though).