a2sd+ is it enough?

[massiv]

Hello all,

I recently rooted my nexus one with the main objective of getting rid of the common internal storage issue. I was very impressed by the MIUI rom, very sleek! well done!

I created a 1GB partition on my sdcard and formatted it as ext3 and installed 1.12.16 surely enough miui detects it and shows it in the A2SD+ section of settings -> SD card Settings.

bash-3.2# fdisk -l /dev/block/mmcblk0

Disk /dev/block/mmcblk0: 16.0 GB, 16012804096 bytes
256 heads, 63 sectors/track, 1939 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16128 * 512 = 8257536 bytes

Device Boot Start End Blocks Id System
/dev/block/mmcblk0p1 1 1818 14660320+ c Win95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/block/mmcblk0p2 1819 1939 975744 83 Linux


bash-3.2# mount | egrep -e 'mmc|vold'
/dev/block/mmcblk0p2 on /sd-ext type ext3 (rw,noatime,nodiratime,barrier=1,nodelalloc,data=ordered)
/dev/block/vold/179:1 on /mnt/sdcard type vfat (rw,dirsync,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1015,fmask=0602,dmask=0602,allow_utime=0020,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro)
/dev/block/vold/179:1 on /mnt/secure/asec type vfat (rw,dirsync,nosuid,nodev,noexec,relatime,uid=1000,gid=1015,fmask=0602,dmask=0602,allow_utime=0020,codepage=cp437,iocharset=iso8859-1,shortname=mixed,utf8,errors=remount-ro)

it is my understanding that A2SD+ moves only the Dalvik cache in the ext3 partition. Although this might be a storage improvement I end-up running out of space again once I finished re-installing all my tons of apps.

My question...

Is there anything else I should/could do? What are you guys doing to solve this problem? are you guys mounting or symlinking /data/app /data/app-private on mmcblk0p2? What does MIUI s***est?

Thanks,
storage desperate max

 

[daenney]

Well yeah, a2sd+ ditches the dalvik cache on the ext-partition but that's only about up to 100MB depending on what you're doing.

But, if your installed app size is a problem, why just not move apps to SD too? app2sd ought to do the trick alright. a2sd+ might clash with it though but there's bound to be someone who's combined the two.

 

[massiv]

has anyone tried to do something on the lines of what s2e does? http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=917377

I guess the bottom line trick is to create a script that during the first boot copies /data/app and or /data/app-private to /sd-ext/app and /sd-ext/app-private and then mounts the ext3 partition on top of them.

 

[cyberstoic]

Yes it moves the Dalvik.

But generally that is not enough if you have a lot of apps.

The first thing I do after flashing the rom is sign in to market, download Terminal Emulator, and then run "su" followed by a2sd install and it will then move apps over as you load them.

I have well over a hundred apps and never have any problem. I currently have a 16gb class 10 sd card with a 2gb ext3 partition and it works very well.

S2E is great on cyanogenmod7 and when I flash cm7 I always use s2e (used to use DT-a2sd) but to my knowledge there is no s2e for miui. I have been tempted to try it several times just to see what it would do, but I never have.

 

[massiv]

Sweet... I ended up resorting to CM7 with the s2e trick.

Nothing rocket science there, /data/apps, /data/apps-private and delvik cache copied to the /sd-ext volume and then (interestingly) mounted over the three mount points in /data.

Now I have plenty of big apps, and merely 50MB used!

I did try "a2sd install" once I had miui installed but it failed cause I later realized that my ext3 partition was being mounted ro ( same issue as this: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1405008&page=2 ), had to re-create the ext3 fs with a microsd adapter.

Thanks,
Max