Actually, putting swap on an SSD == great idea. If you need swap, there aren't any better places to put it. I quote from [0] (for Windows), because it is fairly large wall of text and the relevant point might be missed:

_Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?_

Yes. Most pagefile operations are small random reads or larger sequential writes, both of which are types of operations that SSDs handle well. In looking at telemetry data from thousands of traces and focusing on pagefile reads and writes, we find that

> Pagefile.sys reads outnumber pagefile.sys writes by about 40 to 1,

> Pagefile.sys read sizes are typically quite small, with 67% less than or equal to 4 KB, and 88% less than 16 KB.

> Pagefile.sys writes are relatively large, with 62% greater than or equal to 128 KB and 45% being exactly 1 MB in size.

In fact, given typical pagefile reference patterns and the favorable performance characteristics SSDs have on those patterns, there are few files better than the pagefile to place on an SSD.

On the other hand, attempting to defragment an SSD is truly a bad idea, and pointless at that. Unless you are defragmenting free space, which does get important as the SSD fills with data.

[0] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/e7/archive/2009/05/05/support-and-q-...

This deals with performance, but not durability. The system would pump data into swap at a fast rate during a thrashing situation, wearing out the SSD.

It's not a good idea for an MLC drive, but a decent SSD should fail into read only mode when enough sectors are lost.

It wasn't even the flash that failed, the controller stopped my bios from posting until the sata polling timed out.

Yes it was a cheap SSD, but the difference between the high end and low end should be performance. Not "breaks vs !break". When that is true I'll buy another SSD.

That is not to say that SSDs are "bad", they are just not for me, yet. I like my computers to be low maintenance. I stopped fiddling with hardware for performance a few years ago.