SSD disks and swap

Question

I know this has been discussed numbers of times but still I find it confusing. My new PC will have a SSD (and no traditional hard disk). My question is what to do with the swap and especially the swapiness parameter? Is it really a good idea to reduce it? How the default value of 60 has been decided?
What confuse me is that I have seen too many posts that say, roughly, that we need to avoid any write to the SSD in order to spare it; often to the point we can wonder if the SSD will remain useful... I have seen that SSD supports 100000 write cycles; with a 120GB SSD, you will thus need to write 12000 Tera (12 peta) before it fails. It is clear to me that small things (like putting /var outside the SSD somehow) makes no sense. Even the swap makes me dubious: is it really worthwhile to try to spare the SSD, will it not become obsolete well before it dies. Because the SSD is faster, it could actually make sense to swap on it on an optimal way? SSD supports fast reading of nonadjacent data, which seems a big plus for the swap.
Edited: It seems that this page http://ef.gy/statistics:ssd-write-endurance go in my sense. You will need more that six months to wear a SSD if you write to it at the maximum possible rate 24h/24h. If that is true, the SSD will never fail unless you do it on purpose. I have no estimate how much data we write on a hard disk on average but I think it is only a tiny fraction of that...
# mod edit: please don't rollback edits that make your thread title more relevant to the actual question you are asking. "SSD disk" means fsck all...
Last edited by jasonwryan (2013-08-20 07:04:07)

Answer 1

I think it is highly dependent on what you are using your machine for, but yes, I too see very little swap use with 8GB RAM. In my experience, hibernation on linux (suspend to disk) is far from perfect, and has always cased me more issues than the functionality was worth. 
Recently though, I was able to set up Intel Rapid Start Technology, which is like hibernation controlled by the firmware.  Typically you would use it by setting a timeout in the bios.  So after being suspended for that set period of time, it would power back up partially and write the contents do disk, then "hibernate".  But as of 3.11 Matthew Garrett created a userspace driver for it, so I can set it to only function in the event that my battery gets super low (at what point it decides that I'm not quite sure).
If your machien supports IRST, you should be aware that because it is firmware controlled, you cannot get away with "hibernating" on an Intel Rapid Start Technology partition that is less than the size of your RAM.  It does not compress or try to opitimize the RAM contents for size at all.  Also, it must be used on an SSD, so it is likely going to be taking valuable space on the faster disk.  Interstingly, gehidore has the same machine as me, yet IRST works great for me, yet not at all for him.