Can setting up virtual memory on my flash card (e.g. on 770) wear down the card? Flash cards are specified to be good for a certain number of writes and I was wondering whether use of virtual memory in this way might be write intensive.

That's why I use Transcend SD cards! Lifetime support and super fast transfers!

(Note: This is not an advertisement)

it takes several hundred thousand writes afaik to damage it. that, and the card has build-in write balancing, so if you have a 2GB card, a 128 MB mem can be moved around a lot. And by the time it goes bad (few years), they will be so cheap that in the time you may have saved by having the virtual memory will have by far repaid the cost of a new card.

This memory moving - isn't it somewhat defeated if one has a lot of files (e.g. videos) on the card?

Most probably no. Wear levelling works on much lower level, it does not know which blocks are used by files and which are free.

From the pieces I've read here and there it looks like all flash card blocks are divided to groups and when writing specific block to the card, blocks in same group are reused in circular fashion. So let's say if block group has 100 blocks then every 100'th write rewrites same block. Life time of single block is approximately 100 000 writes and then recoverable errors (on low level, handled transparently for you) may appear. This should be good enough for many years.

But still if I understood it correctly it could help a bit if you move your swap file after some time (months?, year?). The best is to copy the .swap file to another one and then delete the previous one and rename new one to old name. This should result in blocks used for swap to be moved to different group somewhere else on the card.

You mean there is a lifetime warranty that will get u a new Transcend card when it wears out? Can u clarify this? I am afraid of using it this way because I cant afford a new one. thanks

again, by the time it wears out (maybe 5 years from now) you can have saved a dime a month and have enough money to buy a new one then.

Thank you for your reply SamAdam. Can torx or someone else answer more directly my question about warranties:

"You mean there is a lifetime warranty that will get u a new Transcend card when it wears out? Can u clarify this? I am afraid of using it this way because I cant afford a new one. thanks

Does anyone have experience with a card actually wearing out and how long it took? I am trying to decide to use virtual memory or not. Thanks.

This will not answer your question about transcend, but try reading this

And also, consider products like the thousands of pmps that are all based on flash memory... have you heard of them 'wearing out' ?

Really, I don't think it's a valid issue to be concerned with.

Excellent read - the summary is that for a flash-based storage accelerator in a server operating at the maximum theoretical write rate, the flash is expected to fail after 51 years.

Well, music players probably are written to less than 10000 times over their total lifetime, a swap file in a general purpose OS sees somewhat higher usage ...