Question: Introduction
Let’s imagine some environment where the speed is not a factor.In my case I am using a really old computer for a “server” with a lot of stupid things ( personal lab ). It is more important the amount of resources, not their speed.
On what hardware we can use it
My “server” is with 4 GB RAM DDR2 800Mhz and Intel Pentium CPU x86_64 ( with two cores ). So the motherboard doesn’t support more then 4 GB RAM.
Control of the “swap”
It is a Linux “server”, there is a docker install on it, so every application running into a container with RAM and Swap limit.
Also there is a magic variable:
vm.swappiness ?
The swappiness parameter configures how often your system swaps data ?out of RAM to the swap space.
Question?
HDD and SSD have life spin. And if we using it for a “swap” it is a high read / write operations. Of course It is not a production “server”, but it is not also a desktop / personal computer. Anyway It is a bad situation for everyone to broke the hardware, specially when it is an old and the bigger part of their life is over.
So which one is better? Will be a HDD really slow and useless or SSD has a less life spin then HDD?
Answer: SSD is definitely a steroid to any system. Even machines already sentenced to scrap are revived by it.On the other hand, factory specifications really state that their statistical lifetime is smaller than that of HDDs. BUT today even the cheapest SSDs are sold with 3 years of guarantee. I doubt anyone can foresee what kind of gadgets we will use 3 years from now, that’s pretty fair. Sure, it may still crash within that time frame but, as we all must know, if you have something in one instance only, without a backup, then you have already none, no matter of you have HDD or SSD.
I assume you have already guessed what my thoughts are leading to: unless I had some RAID for which I would have to buy HDDs of the same type, I would buy SSD(s) (well, I did it).