On 12/06/2016 01:05 PM, Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton wrote:
it seems to be ok up to a point on the macbook pro one, but beyond a certain point the SSD appears to go into "maintenance" for up to a few seconds at a time, ceasing to deal with writes and reads. generally this is bad :)
That's not what I meant. Flash memory (which most SSDs use) has a definite limit to the number of writes that can be performed on it. Once that limit is reached, it's garbage. Swap being used on a Flash-based SSD may very well be the quickest way to push it to the end of its life for the same reason it slows your system down to a crawl: it's constant disk writing. Having very little empty space while you're doing this (preventing wear leveling from being as effective) would make this even worse.