No surprise on memory

[Mitch Bradley]

John Gilmore wrote:
> Swapping to the soldered-in NAND chips is a very bad idea.  It will
> tend to wear them out rapidly.  Even if you use load-leveling software
> (e.g. swapping to a file in a jfffs2 filesystem), the problem is that
> if you do start wearing out serious numbers of flash blocks, the
> laptop becomes toast; it requires a soldering iron and spare chips to
> fix it.
>   

Well, maybe it's not as bad as all that.  When the NAND wears out, then 
you can buy the SD card, thus deferring that purchase and taking 
advantage of Moore's law in the interim.

Note that I'm not advocating in favor of soldered NAND - in fact I've 
been one of the leading proponents of migrating to an SD-based storage 
solution.  I'm just pointing out that, if you're willing to buy an SD 
card now (which is necessary for the SD-based swap solution), then you 
are probably willing to buy one later.