deb wrote:
On 2/13/2019 8:46 AM, Michael Stone wrote:
On Wed, Feb 13, 2019 at 08:41:33AM -0500, deb wrote:
#1 Given that it's not great to pound the same area of a SSD with
writes; is it indeed still best practice to go with a swap partition
on a SSD rather than a swap FILE?
That's not a thing: the SSD will balance writes physically across the
drive regardless of where they are logically.
OK, that's interesting.
I though the partition might physically lock a section of writes.
Is there a link that goes into that *partitions are not a boundary on
physical SSD writes* further?
For a spinning disk, your OS generally has control of what will
go where*. For an SSD, the incentive to not rewrite a sector
until absolutely necessary is so high that the geometry of the
disk is completely mythical. The SSD controller will pretend
that there are contiguous sectors for partitions to be in, but
they can all be remapped anywhere at any time.
If you want maximum SSD longevity, increase the amount of space
that the SSD can use for remapping by never writing to some
amount of space. Easiest is to not fill the disk with partitions
-- leave 5-10% empty.
*The disk may remap a known bad sector to a pool of reserve
sectors without the OS being told about it. Or not.
If I'm sure, I'll just let Debian partition for Swap.
... I'm still curious how to get the installer to go with a swap FILE rather
than a swap PARTITION though.
The installer doesn't have that option, but if you tell it to go
ahead without a swap partition, you can create a swapfile
later. Or multiple swapfiles. Or use the swapspace package,
which will create and destroy swapfiles as memory requirements
dictate.
-dsr-