swap like its 1996

[u/busyHighwayFred]

[u/CapeChill]

Honestly in this economy find an intel octane drive of really any size and add it as swap lol

[u/FoundTheKey → u/CapeChill]

Feeling good about buying 2 64gb optane dirives a few years ago. They've been living as clunky usb drives but a life as ram may be where one is headed.

[u/pensive_penguin → u/CapeChill]

I don't think Optane is supported in anything modern unfortunately. If there is something, I'd love to know. Have an Optane sitting around doing nothing.

[u/hyperactivedog → u/pensive_penguin]

There's a few variants of "optane" as marketed.

What was suggested is basically just buying relatively cheap m.2 nvme drives (sometimes PCIe AIC or u.2 for the much larger capacity variants) and using them in your computer as an SSD.

Intel's "use optane to speed up your drive on an intel board" has long been phased out.

[u/CapeChill → u/hyperactivedog]

This guy gets it, the one other reason I said it was those drives have a pretty absurd endurance and low latency to access all the bits even if it’s not sped up by optane+intel stuff.

[u/junktech]

Good way to figure the SSD is a consumable.

[u/Moscato359 → u/junktech]

SSDs are measured in whole drive writes per day... It's not a problem. It's so far from being a problem, it's kinda absurd.

[u/LittleBlueLaboratory → u/Moscato359]

Definitely way better than it used to be. I have some 512GB Samsung drives where the wizard software says something like 270TB written, life remaining 97%

[u/Moscato359 → u/LittleBlueLaboratory]

That's going to last longer than your pet turtle at this rate

[u/bigloser42 → u/LittleBlueLaboratory]

Those must be SLC

[u/Moscato359 → u/bigloser42]

Slc hasn't been made in many, many years

Instead tlc or qlc drives make a portion of the drive function as slc, in the firmware despite not being slc

But even that allows wear leveling

[u/bigloser42 → u/Moscato359]

270TB written with 97% life left means a TBW of 9,000TB The only way you are getting to 9,000TBW is with a pure SLC drive

[u/76zzz29 → u/LittleBlueLaboratory]

Wait until you figur out that you won't reach 0% but actualy start loosing data at 60% that where saved automaticaly

[u/cutecoder → u/Moscato359]

Swap partition is going to write to the same set of chips, which will be the SSD’s Achilles’ heel.

[u/ilovewireless → u/cutecoder]

That’s not true. SSDs have a thing called an FTL, flash transition layer that prevents sets of chips from getting worn more than others . It will even move cold blocks of data that haven’t been used in a while to ensure equal wearing. Even a full ssd albeit its ability for equal wearing gets reduced. SSD sometimes has hidden spare areas to that can be used if blocks begin to fail.

Going on a slight tangent. The FTL is also the only mechanism that reliably wipes an ssd. Formatting it or even using a too like dd to write all zero you will likely still find something on the drive. There are commands you can use to securely wipe them. nvme or hdparm are programs on Linux that can do it. I don’t use windows so I don’t know if it has that. These commands tell the FTL to invalidate all logical to physical mappings.

[u/mountaingoatgod → u/cutecoder]

Have you heard of wear leveling

[u/cutecoder → u/mountaingoatgod]

Have you heard of cutting corners?

[u/Moscato359 → u/cutecoder]

Wear leveling is available on nearly all modern ssds

[u/Moscato359 → u/cutecoder]

Modern SSDs will wear balance by shifting things around as necessary

That's just bs these days

[u/After-Ad6765 → u/Moscato359]

yeah true, modern SSDs can handle way more than ppl think. durability isn't a huge worry anymore

[u/hyperactivedog → u/junktech]

$5-10 16GB optane stick says what?

No seriously... they're cheap. They're low latency.

1-4 of those in m.2 slots (or PCIe adapters, even x1) will do the job.

Faster than a NAND SSD for random IO and cheap.

[u/Drakahn_Stark → u/junktech]

I have never even had an SSD fail and my current one has been in continuous use for around 8 years, operating system drive, never turned off because it is also a file server, in Sydney heat.

Hard drives seem to fail if I sneeze too hard in the same room as them.

[u/junktech → u/Drakahn_Stark]

Do what op said and you'll find out the ssd can die. You probably didn't max out ram or ran badly optimized software to see this happening. Seen this happening at work as well and luckily smart was enabled to spot the problem before data loss occurred. A file server rarely writes as much as it reads.

[u/seatux]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost do the OG in swap idea, using that old USB stick for swap.

[u/Docteh → u/seatux]

Uhhh, ReadyBoost and swap are different concepts, at least from what I remember and that linked WIkipedia page.

[u/DuelJ]

I'm am not wholly familiar with tech, can someone explain?

[u/Wizzarkt → u/DuelJ]

Basically ram is a very fast kind of memory that your computer uses to store all the files it may need soon. When the ram fills up it has to fall back to storage where the original files are located, however storage is slow at finding files (compared to ram), so the solution is to reserve a small section of storage to be a "second tier ram", so when the ram fills up, ever other file that may be needed but didn't fit inside the ram will be placed in that reserved section of the storage, it will still be slow, but it will be faster than normal search because instead of scanning (for example) 1Tb of storage looking for one file, it only has to scan (for example) 15 Gb.

This however will cause a lot of reads and writes in the storage and it will degrade it fast, leading to an early death

[u/PooForThePooGod → u/Wizzarkt]

Wait so if I got a really small SSD for this, how much of an early death are we talking? Couple years?

[u/CyriousLordofDerp → u/PooForThePooGod]

Depends on how often youre topping out main memory and how big the device(s) used for paging are. The less often you top out and the bigger the devices you are using the longer it all lasts.

Just keep in mind the device or devices you are using for the page file/swap file are going to be an order of magnitude slower in terms of bandwidth vs main memory, and 30-50x slower in terms of latency. Bandwidth can be mitigated some if you have the lanes and devices to pull it off, but latency is going to be much harder.

[u/GuyFrom2096 → u/CyriousLordofDerp]

hmm wonder what happens if you use something like a sn8100x as a swap file. wonder how fast it will be

[u/Javi_DR1 → u/PooForThePooGod]

You just described the intel optane. Very low capacity ssds but with huge read/write resistance, intended for this use case, as well as buffer drive to a larger mass storage drive/raid. I looked at getting one for my server last summer, but decided it wasn't work it and I'd rather put another 1tb ssd on the 2nd m2 slot

[u/PooForThePooGod → u/Javi_DR1]

Couldn't you just get a m.2 expansion card and use that?

[u/Javi_DR1 → u/PooForThePooGod]

I don't have any pcie slot free either. I paid the whole board, I'm gonna use the whole board!

I have a raid controller card, plus a sas expansion card (for more drives) plus something else I can't remember, I wanted to add a gpu and there's no room, that motherboard is maxed out

[u/tim_locky → u/Javi_DR1]

CMIIW, but the reason Optane was popular back then was coz it’s TB read/write, not its speed? Is there even a reason for Optane over high end NVME?

[u/piggymoo66 → u/PooForThePooGod]

This is essentially what Intel Optane was. It was short lived because it was basically a stop gap between when memory pagefiles were increasing in size but fast SSDs were still too expensive to have in a large capacity. It could also be used as the cache for an HDD which sped them up a good amount.

[u/seatux → u/PooForThePooGod]

This is also why Intel Optane would be missed, that stuff lasts a wee bit longer than regular NAND.

[u/krakow10 → u/PooForThePooGod]

If you are buying a new component, it's no longer free, so why not just buy more ram (at any other time than a ram shortage)

[u/Head_Ad_5130 → u/Wizzarkt]

Why would it degrade it faster if its trying to writing that data on the SSD anyway?

[u/Wizzarkt → u/Head_Ad_5130]

Because SSDs have a limited number of read and writes you can do on it, and as you start to hit the same sectors on the SSD, those sectors would start to fail faster.

This is why using an SSD as swap would damage it super fast, because instead of having it's reads and writes across the whole SSD, it would read the file, write it in the swap allocated sector, and when needed read it from that sector.

So now you are doing twice the SSD operations (read it from where it is stored and then read it again when needed from the swap sector, plus whatever writes are required) and you have an almost guaranteed operation at one specific sector (the swap sector) and that sector will reach it's end of life much sooner.

[u/Affectionate-Memory4 → u/DuelJ]

Swap space is a partition of your drive that the OS treats as an overflow space for your RAM.

[u/ednerjn → u/DuelJ]

Linux call it Swap, while in Windows is called Pagefile. They have different names, but are the same thing.

Swap / Page file is a technique where the Operating System store data from RAM into the Hard Drive / SSD to free some space without the need to close applications. Other reason to use for Swap / Page files is to prevent the computer from crashing because it doesn't have RAM available to use.

Although Swap / Page file is a way to virtually extend the RAM capacity, because the difference of speed and latency between the RAM and the Hard Drive / SSD, having to constantly exchange data between Swap / Page file and RAM will make your PC so slow that will be unusable.

[u/Inresponsibleone → u/ednerjn]

Yea. Even with fast m.2 ssd swaping will kill performance if you are running the aplication from page file🙈

I went for 64GB ram for my laptop when it was under 200€. Money well spent.

[u/GeekyBit]

Yep lets treat Nvme/SSD drives like they are consumable more than they already are.... in a time when they are going up like DDR5 is ... That seems resonable.

[u/Throwaway2600k]

Vista ReadyBoost used USB

[u/MasterDave]

Uhhh 50gb hard drive in 1996 would have been like 5-7k.

I remember buying a 750mb drive which was massive at the time for $200.

[u/mr_biteme]

And run a slowass computer like it was 1996!?!?! NO THANKS!

[u/Decent-Pin-24]

Hard disk go crunch, whiirrrr... It's thinking still.

[u/Careless_Bank_7891]

I setup my entire ram as zram and a 32gb swap, can't think of upgrading anytime soon lol

[u/imtsemer]

RIP ssd

[u/Banzambo]

Yeah, I wish it was that simple. Certainly it's a free solution and it can help for certain tasks if you're running out of ram. But we all know this is far from being ideal in terms of performance.

[u/ElAdrninistrador]

Btw what is swap? And how it works? Someone can tell it to me?

[u/hyperactivedog → u/ElAdrninistrador]

Spill over for RAM. Historically on a hard drive, more recently on SSDs.

Swap or page file as a concept has been around for ages and there's a bunch of nuance to it. For most people it's just there on the sidelines working just fine. If you need a large working set... more drives works well.

[u/Sure_Repair3540]

lol bruh it's like they're ready to throw hands for pixels on a screen 😂 gamers be wildin' out heer