[ale] no putting swap on ssd

[Greg Freemyer]

On Mon, Feb 7, 2011 at 4:35 PM, Ron Frazier
<atllinuxenthinfo at c3energy.com> wrote:
> I was listening to a Security Now podcast by Steve Gibson recently.
>
> http://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm
> http://www.twit.tv/sn
>
> I'm not sure what episode it was.  Anyway, a listener had asked a
> question about SSD drives.  Steve recommended against putting a swap
> file, or presumably a partition, on an SSD due to concerns about
> excessive wear on the storage cells, which do have a finite lifetime.
> Now, at the moment, I don't own an SSD, but it's on my want list.  I
> guess I could always put the swap on a spinning HDD.  Has anyone else
> heard anything about this specific issue?
>
> Ron

Ron,

I think the typical lifetime is 10,000 writes per Erase Block.  I
rarely swap, so 10,000 should last me many years and that's before
Wear Leveling comes into play.

If your system is swapping heavily, then I may agree, but for the vast
majority of desktop users they should simply have enough RAM that they
are not swapping very often.

Also, you may find this paragraph of interest:
http://en.opensuse.org/SDB:SSD_discard_%28trim%29_support#Kernel_swap_device_discard_support

Note that I wrote that whole wiki page, so if you have questions, feel
free to ask.  Most of the page applies to any distro.  I just happened
to document it for openSUSE.

Greg