I generally wouldn’t recommend this, especially if you’re using a cheaper SSD without cache or with QLC memory.
As you already know, cells on an SSD have limited write cycles (as low as 700 for QLC memory) and things like TRIM and wear leveling make sure that your SSD wears uniformly, but on cheaper SSDs the endurance is so low that without cache you will run into wearing issues in a few years of regular use or a few months if you’re using it a lot or with swap enabled. I have seen it first hand many times working in a repair shop.
Keep in mind that endurance is not just a number of terabytes written that will cause your drive to suddenly switch to read-only mode, before it fails it will usually slow down to the point of making your PC unusable, I’ve seen SSDs write as slow as 9MB/s (specifically a Yucun drive from 2018 with TLC memory and no cache), it’s not defective it just has to do a lot of error correction during writes.
Also, another issue that plagues cheap SSDs is that their controllers usually die well before the memory does, keep that in mind when choosing an SSD because this usually happens without early signs of failure or SMART errors.
So in general, unless your PC has a lot of RAM and that swap area will rarely be used, don’t use swap and use zram instead (or just buy more RAM?).
I generally wouldn’t recommend this, especially if you’re using a cheaper SSD without cache or with QLC memory.
As you already know, cells on an SSD have limited write cycles (as low as 700 for QLC memory) and things like TRIM and wear leveling make sure that your SSD wears uniformly, but on cheaper SSDs the endurance is so low that without cache you will run into wearing issues in a few years of regular use or a few months if you’re using it a lot or with swap enabled. I have seen it first hand many times working in a repair shop.
Keep in mind that endurance is not just a number of terabytes written that will cause your drive to suddenly switch to read-only mode, before it fails it will usually slow down to the point of making your PC unusable, I’ve seen SSDs write as slow as 9MB/s (specifically a Yucun drive from 2018 with TLC memory and no cache), it’s not defective it just has to do a lot of error correction during writes.
Also, another issue that plagues cheap SSDs is that their controllers usually die well before the memory does, keep that in mind when choosing an SSD because this usually happens without early signs of failure or SMART errors.
So in general, unless your PC has a lot of RAM and that swap area will rarely be used, don’t use swap and use zram instead (or just buy more RAM?).