Swap partition - SSD or Hard disk? Opinions? I just bought a new SSD and am toying with putting a swap partition on it or should I stick with my HDD?
Well - I would say SSD. How much RAM do you have? And do you do any heavy work on it?
I have 4gb RAM but I have 2 spare 20gb HDDs. The OS is already on SSD but open a couple of browsers and revolution and its swapping. Dont want to wear my SSD out with constant writes. Zorin 16.3 lite.
Swap is not meant to be used as a mean to increase your computer's RAM, but to avoid unexpected crashes when too many programs run at once. 4GB is on the lower end for modern standards, and you will get better performance if you don't attempt to run too many things at once.
You can also try to lower the ratio at which the computer decides when to start moving memory to disk but again, this is not a long-term solution.
4gb is max motherboard supports. It seems to swap at 80%.
Take a look at this thread, it has some good tips and useful information:
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Thanks for that but my question was SSD or HDD. Dont want to ruin a new SSD when HDD will do. Googling the topic shows swapping to SSD is a no.
Technological changes and improvements in SSD's, mean that in modern SSD's, a user does not need to be as concerned over using SSD's for swap.
This is dependent on the date of manufacture and the manufacturer as well as the model in question.
Since SSD's have a more limited read/write cycle than HDD, the trend is to err on the side of caution.
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Thanks for that @Aravisian although the SSD swap is faster it seems my cheap Crucial BX500 is better suited to backup duties and data storage and I will engage the HDDs as swap space.
I'm no expert so please don't follow this blindly but my understanding is that generally, after all is said and done, SSDs and HDDs have very similar lifetime expectancy.
I suppose the use case will make a difference. I remember this was a big deal with smaller SD cards typically used in cameras, specially things like Go Pros with tons of recordings, or Raspberry Pis used for media centers. But as Aravisian says, SSD have come a long way when it comes to read/writes supported.
Once thing that is also not recommended is to use the full capacity on SSDs (again, please correct me if I'm wrong).
Using a HDD first is probably the best choice. If you don't experience any issues with it, then clearly you don't have a need for SSDs and it would be a bit of a waste given how cheap HDD are these days.
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Well the machine is purely a WP, email, browsing PC. Not like it is running CAD. I will see how I get on with HDD swap. Also I just got given some HDDs with a mere uptime of 7 years. Which is a mere juvenile compared to the two HDDs in the machine with uptimes of 16 and 17 years respectively.
Are you using a Lite desktop environment?
Using a lighter D.E. may go a long way toward increasing performance without needing to examine swap or upgrade RAM.
There are many to choose from and several can be configured to resemble the Zorin Gnome D.E. pretty well in appearance.
How do I tell? I installed Zorin 16.3 Lite.
You just told. 
You are using a Light desktop (Zorin OS Lite).
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You don't need swap on SSDs.
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So I have had to restore the SSD swap partition as HDD far too slow so HDD is now priority 3 after SSD and I have decreased swappiness to 15 so should liven things up a bit.