Why Cacko Is So Slow?

[ev1l]

so how long will an sd card (on an average, say Sandisk 1gb) last if a swap file is activated in it. I do notice a difference between using swap and no swap but i dont want the card to die too soon and at a bad time.

I'd say a couple of years at least. Don't bother with very expensive SD cards, they die just as fast as the low capacity ones (well they can accept more writes because they have more cells, but at the same time that increases the probability and dying cells).

[kahm]

Note also that normally it should not kill the card, but rather "blocks of of the card".

So that if you have a partition for swap, in theory this partition will become unusable faster than the rest of the card but the card should still be usable.
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Flash cards have a wear-leveling algorithm that spreads writes across the entire card. (Or at least across free space on the card) So the writes to the swap are going to wear down cells all over the card. A larger card with more free space will likely last longer than a smaller card. It is definitely not going to be just one section of the card that gets worn out.

Theoretically, you should still be able to read data off of a dead card, but that is going to depend on how corrupt the filesystem becomes when the writes start failing. (A linux fs could proably be imaged with DD, loop-mounted on another system, and FSCK'd, but that is likely a post for a different topic.)