[Novalug] Does swap shorten the life of solid state drives?

Jon LaBadie novalugml@jgcomp.com
Thu Jan 27 03:42:52 EST 2011


I replied earlier with iostat data from my Fedora 14 desktop
suggesting swap was basically inactive.  For another data
point here is my Ubuntu 10.10 laptop about a week after boot.
Its drive is an SSD.

  $ swapon -s
  Filename        Type           Size	  Used	  Priority
  /dev/sda2     partition     4095996	 31904	    -1


  $ iostat /dev/sda?
  Linux 2.6.35-24-generic (vost) 	01/27/2011 	_i686_	(2 CPU)

  avg-cpu:  %user   %nice %system %iowait  %steal   %idle
             1.57    0.50    3.44    0.01    0.00   94.48

  Device:    tps  Blk_read/s  Blk_wrtn/s   Blk_read   Blk_wrtn  Mnt_Point *
  sda1      0.00       0.01        0.00        2602        448  /boot
  sda2      0.00       0.03       18.30       11664    8282312  swap
  sda3      0.92      20.97       18.27     9491626    8270192  /   **

 * Again, I added the Mount Point column
 ** VirtualBox's virtual disks are not a separate partition on this system

Quite different results from the desktop system.

Jon
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  novalugml@jgcomp.com
 JG Computing
 12027 Creekbend Drive		(703) 787-0884
 Reston, VA  20194		(703) 787-0922 (fax)



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