Apps2SD and Gameboid

G

GA16

New member
So, I am considering rooting my G1. But, a concern popped into my head. I have read that if you are going to use an SD card, get a class 6. Fine, I understand why. Now, if I put apps2SD, when one of the apps is a video game emulator app like Gameboid, will having that app on the SD cause my SD card to wear out faster? I figure that a processor intensive app like that goes through a lot of read/write cycles. I know the SD cards have a finite number of cycles until they are gone. I would like to not have to deal with replacing SD cards just b/c the emulator is going through them quickly.

On a side note, do you HAVE to use the apps2SD ability? Can you choose which apps go on the SD card and which don't?
 
It sure will wear out your sd faster but you should be fine. A class 6 is recommended but not necessary, I've used a no class card before with no issues. Apps 2 sd actually makes your phone slower but it saves your internal memory so its a trade off for app storage. You can't choose which apps to run off the sd but you can move the apps you want in the phone memory and they will run off the phone and not the sd.
 
It'll be fine.
I really haven't ever herd or seen any post claiming
Over clocking or apps2sd wrecked an sd card.
If you want to get into Swapper and Compache yea I've seen dead sd cards come out of that every now and then but it's cause it wasn't a high class sd card.

I ran apps2sd on my stock 1 gig sd card on my g1 [thanks to sims] fine for months, but recently I was using Amons recovery and I accidentally set swap on and that gave me a dead sd card.

Now on my 2 gig sd card
No problems
No Swap.
 
I think I am not understanding something with what you said. You say I can't choose which apps to run off the sd, but then you say I can move the apps I want in the phone memory and they will run off of the phone. I'm confused.

Is this like loading the app into a type of virtual memory? Is it apps2sd moves everything to the sd and then I can pick and choose which to move back? sorry for all of the questions.
 
a2sd does automatically move every app u download to the sd but, if there are apps u want in the phone memory u can move those from the sd to the phone, dont mind questions, keep em coming lol
 
I've done some tests and a lot of research in this kind of area myself. Basically, any type of flash memory can only be written to a certain number of times - some as low as 10,000, but modern flash memory can last 100s of times longer. In fact, the class of card makes no direct difference to the life expectancy - it's just the minimum write speed in MB/s. So a class 6 can write at a minimum speed of 6MB/s. However, newer designs of SD cards do, in general, last longer, and hence the faster cards do last longer, sometimes.

Having Apps on your SD is probably fine. Most apps just load, save the occasional block of data (e.g. a high score, some settings, today's weather, etc) and that's it. Other's are written in such a way that they write pretty much constantly to the SD card. In theory, I guess you could break a class 6 SD card like that in as little as 10 seconds, if you deliberately wrote some software to re-write the same sector constantly.

Moving Compcache and/or swap will really hurt your SD card.

For the benefit of anyone who's bothered to read this far, I'll explain what these are...

The swap file is simply virtual memory. Operating systems free up the faster system memory (RAM) by moving (swapping) data that isn't being used at the time to the slower, but bigger, disk/SD card. When that data is needed again, the OS loads it back into main memory.

Compcache is a similar idea. The problem with swap files are that they're stored on slow disks. It's faster to compress the data stored in main memory (a bit like zipping it), freeing up a smaller amount of space, than it is to swap it out to disk.

Therefore, both of these can be very heavy in terms of disk-writing. So I wouldn't advise moving these to SD.
 
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