tvc wrote:Writing to an SSD consists of a delete then a write, over time this wares down the cells in the SSD (they're notorious for not lasting long), if you're treating the SSD as RAM, it's performing many read/writes all the time and will ware down your SSD faster then it would do with normal use.
I'm coming late to the party here but apparently the "not lasting long" meme is more a rumour, than fact, unless you have first hand evidence of SSDs crapping out?
I've actually had 3 SSDs die on me, but they were the older crappy jmicro controller based ones deployed as a cache (being _written_ to 24/7 non stop, continously) for 3 to 6 months - SUPER TALENT brand. Luckily SSD tech has moved on and hopefully these are now obsolete. Pricier intel brand ones deployed the same took this load in their stride, and appear to have a MTBF 10 times greater than spinners even taking into account the wear levelling.
Thats subjecting the drives to a load level that would also kill a lot of normal hard drives.
I'd be quite confident sticking Intel brand SSDs into important stuff.. though I might RAID1 them and get ones from different batches just for peace of mind if it was real important.
edit - I got 3 PCs with swap on SSD, 2 x Intel, 1 x SUPER TALENT, all running 32 bit Xubuntu Linux with 1G, 2G and 4G RAM respectively, be interesting to see how they cope over time.
Running "vmstat 300" (300 second update interval) and monitoring the "si" and "so" columns will indicate how hard the box is hitting the swap over time to see if we need to care about this anyway.