[GRLUG] Solid State Drives

[John-Thomas Richards]

On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 07:58:46PM -0500, topher at wcsg.org wrote:
> 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.

You have an accurate imagination.  ;-)  SSDs are made of flash memory,
which has a limited number of writes possible.  Swap will, of course,
make many writes (assuming you need to use swap often), thus reducing
the life of the SSD.

> 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?

Dunno how quickly, but much more quickly than you will without a swap
partition.  I defintely suggest more RAM.
-- 
john-thomas
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I have studied it often, but I never could discover the plot.
Mark Twain, author and humorist, on dictionary (1835-1910)