• jim3692@discuss.online
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    24 hours ago

    SSDs are way more efficient than HDDs for swap.

    SSDs are electronic, while HDDs are mechanical. This means that moving memory regions (pages) between system RAM and the storage requires:

    • physical moves, in the case of HDD
    • accessing a different region of the chips, in the case of SSD

    Imagine a scenario in which completely unrelated data access requests floods your storage drive. An HDD needs to constantly realign its needle to the requested locations, while the SSD can just re-route its data lines to that location.