On 13/7/23 11:15, Charles Curley wrote:
I'm not sure that this is correct. I have several SSDs around here, all several years old, all with swap partitions and all in daily use. None has failed me yet.
Most modern SBC images for Debian and Armbian don't have a swap partition. It's not usually necessary and it provides a vector for wear on the device.
If you don't have a swap partition then you won't have more writes to drive than otherwise. Every write reduces the remaining life of the drive. That is not just in the swap partition as the drives wear level irrespective of any format used.
In the same vein, it's really a bad idea to run video surveillance on a SSD as overwriting the complete SSD every couple of weeks will trash it in no time. There are probably SSDs that boast to do this, but the standard now is using carefully designed spinning drives optimised for surveillance.
In my personal experience, I ran a 500GB WD NVME drive on my workstation without a swap partition and no surveillance. After 3 years It had worn it down 30%. Not a drama as I was swapping it out, but surprising for just a workstation.
Jeremy