Asked 6 years, 5 months ago. Active 11 months ago. Viewed k times. Improve this question. Jesse Nickles 2 2 silver badges 12 12 bronze badges. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. Hibernating our system Waking from hibernation is indeed very fast from a SSD. The SSD is the only drive we have We don't really have a choice in this case. Note on speed SSDs are best at quickly accessing and reading many small files and are superior to conventional hard drives for transferring data from sequentially-read small or medium-sized files.
Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. Takkat Takkat k 50 50 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. So we can conclude that we should use SSDs preferably to store data that ideally are written once ore rarely and need to be read pretty often. Like the system files, program files or the home folder's data directories Music, Videos, And yes, I understood that the controller tries to distribute usage evenly among all cells to enlarge the life span.
ByteCommander See edit for some more points regarding your comment. There are however reports on quite significant performance drops not only from an ageing SSD but also from sequential reading over a longer time span such as video streaming. See e. So we should not rely on the initial great values to last forever. Interesting post from Seagate, however this was written circa - and SSD's came a long way between then and - particularly with respect of background garbage collection and wear leveling - which drastically alter the landscape - see techreport.
Also, back in , ssd controller cards were a lot buggier. Show 4 more comments. I am tempted to believe this, but I want to wait for further reactions and would also appreciate any references as proof. I will accept an answer when there is valid proof or a clear majority for one point. While not statistically valid for life of your SSD. SSD life test final techreport. I have had hard drives fail within a year, but that is not normal.
Seems like it's still worth it but maybe not. David Knipe 3 3 bronze badges. Dorian B. Faheem Mitha 7, 1 1 gold badge 13 13 silver badges 17 17 bronze badges. Arkanoid Arkanoid 7 7 bronze badges. Life Vs Performance Balance. Rob Lawton Rob Lawton 51 1 1 silver badge 1 1 bronze badge. What is the significance, if there is any, of the bold opening letters to some of the paragraphs? However, it hibernates regularly say, once a day , requiring a large swap write.
Has been in use for just over 4 years. Runs Debian on ext4, and a swap partition. Used to contain a Windows 10 installation for a couple of years, but no longer.
Has no configuration to spare the SSD no swappiness tweaking, etc. Has 4GiB memory, so probably more swap pressure; although system usage tends to be fairly light. Rarely hibernates. Runs Debian 10 on ext4, with a separate swap partition. Conclusion Two very different systems, both used for years with swap on an SSD, and both systems are totally fine.
BeastOfCaerbannog 7, 9 9 gold badges 34 34 silver badges 55 55 bronze badges. It's also much faster, and it will never well, almost never degrade like SSD drives do. Swapping memory to disk is a symptom of not enough RAM. If you need to speed up swapping, don't speed up the swap disk, upgrade your RAM and the swapping will go away. Swapping should be considered a last-resort backup plan anyway.
A lot of people are saying "don't swap if you can help it", but this is misleading, at least for Windows and probably for Linux too. Windows, esp. It does this irrespective of how much RAM you have. I have 4GB, only half in use, but swapping still happens. Disabling swapping is a bad idea too, because some programs can require huge amounts of memory reserved for them think Photoshop , and you can easily get out of memory messages. It depends on usage, but swapping is always useful to have for extreme situations.
Another thing to consider is whether your current swap drive is also your main drive. For most people, the answer will be yes. That means the hard drive is having to access paged virtual memory whilst also accessing data and programs. In this case, having an SSD for paging is likely to make a noticeable improvement. I'm looking for somebody who's tried this to give definitive info on performance, but on paper the case looks clear-cut. Patrick Regan's answer about "swappiness" is pretty spot on: Depending on your usage, it might be fine, and if you're using Linux you can tweak "vm.
So I'm tempted to say yes, as long as you give lots of disk to your swap. I've been hearing lots about the internal controllers on SSD drives having super-tweaked algorithms to combat write wear, so in theory this would help -- give it lots of space, and set the kernel swappiness level low, and the SSD controller can spread the writes out and prevent any wear trouble.
So that got me to wondering what the largest swap partition could be. I locked onto your mention of "swap partition" and thought "Linux", so I looked into the maximums there. It turns out you can create ridiculous things like 16 TB swap partitions, at least based on the kernel math. However, the kernel can't use it. According to this , 16 GB is about the biggest swap partition you can make and use in a modern Linux kernel.
So yes, you can, if your usage is going to be fairly swap-free. If you'll be swap-heavy, though, maybe a cheapo USB key for ReadyBoost or the Unix equivalent would be a better fit -- that way when your swapping destroys the device from overwriting, it'll be cheap to replace and won't cost you the price of another SSD. Some more fresh data about SSDs nowadays. I can't really sell it, so I can use it for virtual memory.
Well, why not? It is still better than an HDD. If you have to have a page file, put it on a legacy drive. The following test shows that many of them fail after a while. I would assume it is more than two or three years of usage.
I would use it as a virtual drive if I really need it, but if it is an available option, just expand your RAM as far as you can in necessity. Use this virtual memory only if you run out of options. On the other hand, you can use your older SSD for this purpose, and you can replace it for USD any time if fails probably won't for a long while , it can be useful.
One last sidenote: if you now have only HDD, go and get an SSD, migrate your operating system, you will feel like you bought a new computer. Although the random read of SSD drives is very good, the random write performance can be very bad. So in conclusion, the swap performance of your SSD may well be better, but do not assume that this will be the case until you have checked the number of random write IOPS your SSD can achieve.
I would be inclined to say that the performance gain from it is not worth it, especially if you have a lot of RAM. Not to mention that SSD sizes are relatively small, so you may not want to eat up a few GB worth of pagefile on it anyway. I think it would depend on how much RAM you have and how your "swappiness" is set.
I have a swap set up on my computers, but if I don't hibernate, I rarely write to it. I tend to not max out my RAM usage. But if you know you're hitting swap a lot, I'd say no. If you don't hit it a lot, I'd say go for it. FWIW: I've been using my pagefile. Windows must thrash on something, so thrashing on an SSD is much better than thrashing on a traditional HD ;-.
If this actually decreases the lifespan of the SSD, so what? Unless you need the swap file for suspend to disk for example , I would simply turn swapping off and get rid of your swap partition.
The point of swap is to provide an extra cache level. Since your SSD has a low latency, the gains of using swap are much lower. If your system hardly ever swaps, then it makes even more sense to just get rid of it. I've been running a few Linux boxes without any swap for a few years now on regular hard disk drives without performance issues. Sign up to join this community. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top. Stack Overflow for Teams — Collaborate and share knowledge with a private group.
Create a free Team What is Teams? Viewed 55k times. Improve this question. Add a comment. Active Oldest Votes. If you do not hibernate you may never need to swap at all. If not used for hibernation you can alway add a swap partition or swap on file later: How do I add a swap partition after system installation?
Adding a new swap file. How to edit fstab to enable swap after reboot? Improve this answer. Community Bot 1. Takkat Takkat k 50 50 gold badges silver badges bronze badges. Thanks for your response. I don't think I will be hibernating if boot times are as quick as I have read. Thanks again!
TenPlus1 TenPlus1 1, 8 8 silver badges 10 10 bronze badges. I would suggest the same thing. I have 8gb RAM on my thinkpad and the only time swap even got activated so far was while running 2 virtual machines and eclipse side by side However, if you intend to hibernate, then you will need swap.
I don't plan on hibernating any with the implied boot times I have been reading. The 16gb of ram is due to this being a light video editing rig. Not sure yet if it will max out the ram.
For security, I would strongly suggest to never go without any swap. Doing one mistake like running something RAM-hungry when you're low on memory can bring your whole system down if you don't have swap.
For lightweight home use it shouldn't be too much of a hassle, but if you do anything more advanced - have some swap just in case, it doesn't hurt you, but can save you some unplanned reboots. In , 16GB can be exhausted pretty quickly
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