[GRLUG] Solid State Drives

[topher at wcsg.org]

In general I suck at dealing with hardware.  I am ok with this. 
Occasionally it bites me, and I ask you guys.  So here you are.

I got an HP 2133 with a 4G SSD.  It's really slick.  I installed Minbuntu 
on it, and it worked great.  A friend of mine said "Dude, you made a swap 
partition?  That'll kill your drive!" I seem to remember that SSDs have a 
limited number of read/writes and I'm guessing swap reads and writes a 
lot.  I just made that up though.

So I re-installed with no swap partition, and the performance dropped 
incredibly.  For all intents and purposes it's not usable.  My assumption 
then is that I need that swap partition, though I think I can upgrade the 
ram.  I know you can buy it with 1G, and I have 512.

So my question is, how quickly am I going to kill the drive if I have a 
swap partition?  Should I just pony up for the RAM?

Topher