No swap, swap or swap with hibernate. And do you change the swappiness setting?

  • HumbleExaggeration@feddit.org
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    13 hours ago

    Noob question: what is bad about having a swap drive on an SSD?

    When installing OpenSuse, I followed the recommended setup, of creating a swap drive equally sized to my 32 GB RAM. And because I only have SSDs this also sits on an SSD. Seems to be working fine so far with quick hibernation and wakeup. What am I missing?

    • black0ut@pawb.social
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      8 hours ago

      It will work fine, the issue is drive degradation. Especially if you don’t have a lot of ram, swap will be used a lot. SSDs degrade with writes, so swapping on them reduces their life. This is especially noticeable on old or cheap SSDs, which tend to degrade faster. One example is those 8GB RAM macs with soldered 256GB SSDs, which due to cheap and small SSDs and low RAM were breaking really quickly.

      If your SSDs have a lot if space, they are relatively new and you have a lot of RAM (32 GB is perfectly fine), you won’t have much issue. If you’re worried about it, you can always check drive health with smartctl