Dangers of swap on SSD?

[Abueesa]

Hey y'all,

One of the things I love about my MBA is that when it runs out of RAM I don't even notice.

I presume this is because the SSD is so fast you don't notice it swapping.

But I have a niggling memory from the old netbook days (well, 2008) that excessive writes to an SSD can degrade it. Is that still the case, and does swap fall into this scenario?

By the way, I bought the 2GB 13" because I didn't think you'd be able to do enough on this 'toy' to warrant upgrading to 4GB. But now I've got it I use it for graphics work and software development and it handles everything perfectly. My Activity Monitor always shows 10mb remaining...

So should I upgrade to the 4GB model to save my SSD from frying, or can I just bump along in swap forever?

TIA
Abueesa

 

[Beaverman3001]

All depends on what controller Apple's SSDs use, but most if not all spread out writes over the drive to avoid wearing it down. Drives are also much more resilient than they were a few years ago. Personally I think the drive being used with a high amount of swapping would easily still out live the devices useful lifespan. But I'm not drive expert by any means.