I decided to set it up so I dual-boot from the internal SD/MMC card. The Wiki article promised the N800 would be twice as fast overall that way, owing to the file system no longer being journaled and compressed. They were right! It's MUCH snappier now... a far more pleasing experience.

I've also extended virtual memory to that card for the time being. I suppose it all depends on how intelligently the N800 uses the swap file, whether I'll burn up the card in a week's use or not. I decided to use a swap file because I like to have Pidgin and Skype open more or less continuously plus several browser windows open at once.


A pity there isn't a utility to measure how much life remains in an SD card. (And I wonder whether the write-cycles have to do with a particular physical region -- in which case I could periodically rename my swap file and create a new one to extend the useful life of the card -- or the card overall.)

I am currently using the supplied 128MB MiniSD card in the external slot. I'm thinking I may get another high-speed card and use it in the external slot... and put the virtual memory on THAT card. My reasoning here is that it's currently much easier to back up any data files stored on the external drive and I'd get a minor speed boost by having the swap file on a separate device than the one I'm using for the operating system (similar to the way Windows runs slightly faster when you place the virtual memory file on a separate disk drive than the system partition).