[TriLUG] SWAP and SSD vs HDD

[Tim Jowers]

Hi,

Pretty sure all <15 year old drives have solid state memory. the spinning
disks are used if that first level cache is not hit. So, if your idea is
that solid state will be less reliable than reads from a platter, then I
don't know if that is justified. Is it? Is this correct? Maybe some laptop
drives don't have the solid state cache?

Cheers,
Tim


On Thu, Nov 6, 2014 at 8:35 AM, <matt at noway2.thruhere.net> wrote:

> I tend to agree with your reasoning and this was my thought after reading
> the question.  I imagine that swap usage would likely be minimal on a
> machine like that as far as needing it, but expect the old adage of "if
> you build it, they will come" to apply.  In other words, if you give the
> machine swap space, it will routinely use it for something even if it
> isn't strictly needed.  As it would still be slow by comparison, I would
> be inclined to put it on the HDD as you probably won't notice the
> performance difference and you would eliminate the unnecessary SDD wear.
>
> > Well my thoughts, and the reason I asked are the concerns over SSD useful
> > life in applications where there are frequent smaller writes, such as
> > swap.  Now most likely I will elect to turn the vm.swappiness value down
> > to
> > about 10 on this machine when all is said and done.
> >
> > The way I was figuring it was like this:
> >
> > 1.  put swap on ssd and better swap performance, but potentially lessen
> > useful life of drive
> > 2.  put swap on hdd and worse swap performance, but ssd faces less
> > frequent
> > writes
> >
> > I can't say I have ever setup a machine without swap other than how my
> > Chromebook is setup.  That works just fine and all but maybe I am
> thinking
> > to old school in this case by saying to myself:
> >
> > "Thou must have SWAP!!!"
> >
> > Ken
>
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