On Thursday 10 September 2009 6:54:34 pm Stroller wrote:
> On 10 Sep 2009, at 09:30, Alan McKinnon wrote:
> > ...
> > But I doubt the wisdom of updating an SSD netbook on the machine
> > itself:
> >
> > 1. Wear on the SSD itself with all those compiles
> > ...
> 
> No harm in compiling on a hard-drive, via NFs or otherwise. I believe
> read speed of SSDs is fast, writes are slow.
> 
> However, I am sceptical of wear claims, at least of you're using ½-
> decent flash memory (and SanDisk & Kingston are cheap these days, at
> least in "modest" but usable sizes like 4gig).
> 
> I have read many people talk about wear of flash memory to be a
> problem, but I don't think from anyone who's actually HAD a problem
> with it. I have read of many people using it happily for root
> filesystems over periods of years.
> 
> I concede that syncing the portage tree & the compilation of emerging
> packages results in an above-average number of writes, but I have this
> notion that the wear / limited writes problems have been largely
> overcome with modern flash memory (c.f. "write levelling").
> Furthermore I have heard figures bandied about in the order of
> 100,000s per block and such as "you'd need to write to the flash card
> constantly for years" in order to kill it.
> 
> I would really love to hear empirical evidence either way on this
> matter, but I don't think the OP needs to be too cautious of wear. (Of
> course this  advice is worth what he paid for it, and warrantied to
> that value).
> 
> Some previous comments:
> http://archives.gentoo.org/gentoo-user/msg_d6e65b4d64a51c97f7c43c723e525e06
> .xml
> 
> Stroller.
> 

I would think that as long as you back up personal and important files you 
could do it as often as needed to maintsin security and stability.  You may 
want to use --pretend (-p) to see exactly what would be done and also use 
regular updates instead of deep updates which should only be used when needed.