[Discuss] ssd's in linux

[Richard Pieri]

Nathan Burridge wrote:
> Use a standard drive for swap and high change rate volumes.

So conventional wisdom says. Conventional wisdom is wrong on this. The 
entire point of using flash-based SSDs is performance, specifically fast 
random read performance. For performance, it is best to put your swap on 
SSD and use an eager swap policy. That way when physical memory is 
allocated it is "mirrored" to swap at allocation time. This minimizes 
writes to swap (flash writes are slow) while maximizing read performance 
from swap (flash reads are very fast). This is one of the best ways to 
use SSDs.

Flash-based media is consumable. It's a matter of how long it takes 
before it runs out of usable cells. Six months, a year, two years, maybe 
five for the enterprise-grade models. Buying into SSD means accepting 
the fact that you will replace it in the foreseeable future. Given that? 
Pushing a SSD as hard as possible is the best value for your money.

-- 
Rich P.