[Discuss] SSD drives vs. Mechanical drives

[dsr at randomstring.org (Dan Ritter)]

On Tue, May 06, 2014 at 09:07:36AM -0400, Kent Borg wrote:
> 
> Go ahead and put swap on SSD if you like. I hear the SSD firmware
> and the redundant chips will save you from chip failures. You should
> be okay...

For a modern server, swap should be an emergency usage only.
0-200 MB of usage and no pgswp in/out is normal. Given that,
your SSD should see a thousand more times activity from the rest
of the things that your system does.

On laptops, swapspace is hibernation space, so you'll get a
little more use, but it still shouldn't represent a significant
write burden.

On a desktop... I dunno. My desktop has a ton of RAM and uses a
whopping 56MB of swap. Machines with less RAM seem to be using
up to 340MB of swap, but no significant activity. I was going to
say something about web browsers with a thousand tabs open, but
pathological behavior is pathological behavior.

-dsr-