[Novalug] Does swap shorten the life of solid state drives? (John Christopher)

Roger W. Broseus rogerb@bronord.com
Fri Jan 28 22:50:28 EST 2011


Unless you are "short" on ram, I go with the crowd: swap should have minimal 
impact on an SSD because little is actually swapped out under Linux unless you 
are doing things that use a LOT of memory (ram). This happens to me only in 
the following circumstance: running a virtual machine - Windows with Linux as 
the host. When Windows starts, usage of ram climbs through the roof. I added 
ram to my laptop to overcome this problem (to speed things up). Just running 
Virtual Box with no client leads to little additional usage of ram.

When Win is not running, ram usage is normally about 250 MB - that's with 
FireFox and Thunderbird open. Usage climbs to 292 MB when I also open 
OpenOffice Writer. More programs open - jEdit (a nice text editor): 328 MB. 
Konqueror: 360 MB. I could go on . . . with all of these open, swap is zero. 
(I monitored this with System Monitor under Ubuntu 10.04.) Of course when one 
closes unneeded apps., ram usage goes down.

Conclusion: swap is unlikely to lead to writes to the SSD. Of course Window$ can.

Finally, solid state memory devices commonly have write algorithms that cause 
writes to spread out so that writes are uniform across the device to avoid 
problems such as that which your seem to worry about.

This article on Wikipedia is helpful: http://tinyurl.com/66l6p79.

--
Roger W. Broseus - Linux User
     Email: RogerB@bronord.com
     Web Site: www.bronord.com


On 01/27/2011 07:27 AM, novalug-request@calypso.tux.org wrote:
>     3. Does swap shorten the life of solid state drives?
>        (John Christopher)



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