This doesn't have anything to do with the Anandtech article or SSD's. Thrashing is something you're likely to experience when you don't have enough RAM and you're using a HDD. The avoidance of thrashing is one of SSD's key benefits.Ah! Have you ever heard the term Thrashing?...
The point of the Anandtech article is that SSDs will last a really long time and that typical users have nothing to worry about.I will certainly admit that you've gotta be using your computer in a fairly unusual manner to cause it to thrash heavily. However, let me note a few things:
- The technique the writers of that article used to force-feed data to those SSDs involved writing files to a nearly empty drive (only 10GB of "static data"), erasing them, and rewriting them. This is going to be quite favorable to the SSD's wear-leveling algorithm. I would think a normal user will have a lot more data stored in their SSD, and I doubt OSX's swapfile mechanism will be quite as convenient for wear-leveling; it is possible that a smaller section of the SSD will get hit harder by paging activity.
- Moreover, the test they used wrote data sequentially. I'm not privy to the technique OSX is currently using, but paging mechanisms will normally need to store and retrieve pages in a more random access manner; again, this can encourage more uneven wear on the SSD...
SSD wear-leveling works both statically and dynamically. Dynamically, data will always be written to empty pages. Statically, stored data will be moved around so that the same "free" space on the SSD isn't written to over and over again. This transpires at the SSD's firmware level - it is invisible to OS X. The data written to the swap file is just like any other data - there's nothing special about it as far as the SSD is concerned.
The only difference is on a HDD, the OS attempts to keep the swap file contiguous since it improves read/write performance (the HDD's mechanical read/write heads don't have to move around as much). On a SSD, those rules don't apply - the swap file is scattered across the SSD (non-contigous data doesn't affect performance). Again, the OS has no idea where the data is being stored on the SSD.
Most of us would agree that if you're normally using several gigabytes or more of swap at a time, that a memory upgrade is in order (which may require the purchase of a new Mac these days). But you have to really be at the extreme end of usage to prematurely wear out an SSD.
One tip that is good for both SSD performance and longevity is to keep some free space on the SSD. There are various rules of thumb on how much - 10% being pretty typical for 250-500GB SSDs, maybe more with smaller drives, maybe less with really large drives, but it depends on usage. Also, most SSD's also have limited "reserved blocks" space to substitute out bad blocks with good ones, as well as to cache data for wear-leveling.
Here's a Samsung white paper that offers some pretty easy to understand explanations of how this all works.