Do I need swap with new SSD?

Question

Am about to upgrade to new SSD and thinking through partition migration process. Will I need SWAP with an SSD? I have 8GB RAM and an i5 processor.

Answer 1

With 8 GB RAM most likely swapping is not necessary, but you need swap if you have a laptop and want to use the hibernate option. You could also go for a swap file instead of a swap partition.

Answer 2

This is information on how to maximize performance of your SSD. Make sure to read the section about Swap and tmp, which explains whether swap is needed or not. And as January said, with 8GB RAM you probably won't need a swap.

Now that SSDs have moved into the realm of affordability, there's little reason not to use one for your next PC, if you're not already using one. But Linux, as with Windows, has spent decades being tuned for spinning platter drives and while performance is noticeably increased when using an SSD under Linux, there are a number of tweaks and filesystem changes you can do to make the most of your SSDs.

• Filesystem layer
• Scheduler
• Swap and tmp

Linux is pretty good at only using swap if it really needs to, but even so if you're installing to an SSD and you have a mechanical hard drive in your system, be sure to put the swap partition on it instead of the SSD. If you've already installed Linux and allocated a swap partition on the SSD, you can simply set aside a partition on a spinning platter drive and edit your /etc/fstab swap entry to point to it instead. Read on

• Applications
• Partition alignment¹

^{1Source:How to maximize SSD performance with Linux}