Swap – Put Swap on SSD or HDD?

hard driveinstallationpartitioningssdswap

New installation coming up. 120gb SSD for OS and HOME and 1tb HDD for storage. 16gb of ram which means 16gb of swap if I recall correctly. SSD space is too valuable for a swap partition right? If my thinking is correct can someone guide me through or point me in the right direction for putting a swap partition on a second hard drive? I have always selected the automatic settings when installing ubuntu. Thanks!

Best Answer

A swap partition on your SSD will let you wake up faster from hibernation (aka "suspend to disk") as compared to swap on a hard drive. But given the incredibly fast boot time of Ubuntu when booting from SSD a wake up from hibernation may be slower than a reboot.

If you do not hibernate you may never need to swap at all.

Only in case you often have very many RAM intensive applications running in parallel, your system may eventually use swap. Then a swap on SSD will be somewhat faster than a swap on a hard drive. Still there is no need to worry about wearing of your SSD from extensive swapping.

If not used for hibernation you can alway add a swap partition or swap on file later:

Related Question