On an SSD, are there any advantages to a swap partition over a swap file?

Question

If my only "hard drive" is a smallish SSD, are there any advantages to setting up a swap partition rather than a swap file?

I don't even have a swap on my 80GB SSD as I've 8GB of RAM and do not need hibernation.
No swap here. my system is so quick booting I do not touch suspend and hibernation.

psusi · Accepted Answer · 2011-06-23 15:19:15Z

up vote 1 down vote accepted

It makes no difference either way.

edited Jun 23 '11 at 15:19

answered Jun 23 '11 at 14:56

psusi
13k1032

	That's wrong. The kernel does support hibernating to a swap file. This works out of the box on some Ubuntu releases, others require manual tuning of the kernel command line in the bootloader configuration. – Gilles Jun 23 '11 at 15:08
	I am pretty sure it has never worked out of the box since it requires manually pointing the resume_offset boot parameter to the location of the file, but I guess that does work if you bother. Answer corrected. – psusi Jun 23 '11 at 15:18
	@psusi I know there is at least one hibernation framework on at least one Ubuntu version where you just issue the hibernate command and it takes care of setting up `resume_offset`. I don't remember which version that was, possibly 9.04 or 9.10 or 10.04, and I think the framework was `uswsusp` but I'm not sure. – Gilles Jun 23 '11 at 15:24
	@Gilles uswsusp is something you have to install yourself. Out of the box Ubuntu has always just used the built in kernel implementation. – psusi Jun 23 '11 at 15:57
	@punsi Thank you for your answer. Why would anyone choose a swap partition over a swap file, then, especially for smaller drives? What do you gain? – Closure Cowboy Jun 23 '11 at 23:20

1 Answer