Should I move the swap location for my Mac from the SSD to the larger HDD in my laptop?
Background information: I've heard some suggestions in the general PC/Windows world that if you have an SSD for your OS and HDD for your user data, you should move the swap location/swap file away from the SSD to the HDD (perhaps re protecting the hits on the SSD perhaps). Note I have a MacBookPro with SSD & HDD both in it (using the optical drive bay).
PS. Question stems from Steve's words from http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-284.txt
STEVE: And Mark Thompson and I have discussed this at length. He's
performed the experiment of using an SSD for a swap file and watching
it burn out the SSD. I mean, in a relatively short time it just
killed it. And so, anyway, so my advice stands, which is, if you're
using an SSD, hopefully before you have gone to the expense of using
an SSD, which is still much more expensive than a hard drive, you will
have invested money in as much RAM as your system can handle because
RAM is much less expensive, and you'll get much more, you'll get huge
benefit from going to the most RAM you can possible get. And if
you've done that, then turn off pagefiles. And if the only drive you
have is an SSD, I stand by my advice.I agree that, from a performance standpoint, the SSD is a perfect
device for containing the pagefile. Unfortunately, Microsoft thrashes
their pagefile. I mean, they're writing to it a lot. Yes, 40 times
less than they're reading, but it's something that's going on all the
time, pretty much. I mean, we've all seen, we've watched the hard
drive light flickering there, like when nothing is going on. It's
like, what is it doing? Well, who knows. But we know that it's
writing to the pagefile, which it does a lot. So anyway, I think it's
a perfect example of two different people with very different aspects
of the problem that they're addressing. I'm looking at long-term
life. Microsoft's looking at performance.
Best Answer
I am certainly not an expert, but I would think that the faster read/write rates on an SSD would ensure faster performance on large programs than the hdd would.