Limitations of compact flash

So my reason for using a CF card instead of a hard drive was to reduce noise and power consumption. One of the current limitations of compact flash, is that it has limited write cycles - the exact number varies from brand to brand, but somewhere between a few hundred thousand and a million.

Most linux distributions use "swap" space on the hard drive as extra ram, in the event that there isn't enough physical ram for ongoing operations. The hard drive is slower at reading and writing than ram, so this isn't ideal but at least means the operating system doesn't freeze when it runs out of physical ram. However, if a CF card were to be used as swap, it would very quickly be ruined, due to the limited write cycles.

Hence why I chose DSL and Puppy in the first place. Or so I thought, until I noticed the hard drive light blinking away and discovered that Puppy had created a swap file on one of my partitions. There may be a boot option to turn that off, but in the meantime I've been using DSL exclusively.

DSL definitely is running 100% in ram and not using a swap file. Mostly it runs great - fast, stable. It is rather minimal, but learning to set things up using the command line or writing scripts has been educational. However, I've had recurring problems with DSL freezing - usually after some time running Opera or Firefox. It turns out this is what happens when you run out of memory. I've been writing to the DSL forum, but haven't found a way around this - yet.