logoalt Hacker News

SV_BubbleTimetoday at 1:54 AM4 repliesview on HN

If you are doing video models, this is an excellent way to murder your SSD.

Do not put swap on an SSD you care about at all.


Replies

zozbot234today at 6:56 AM

You can of course monitor SMART wearout indicators to check whether this is happening. Casual use of swap for non LLM-use is actually fine since "cold" ephemeral data will be swapped out first and that will never get written to; KV cache is mostly fine since it's similarly append-only so writes are tolerably small; but yes, more general LLM inference totally breaks that limited-writes pattern and will wear out/kill your media.

Insanitytoday at 3:06 AM

I was writing it somewhat tongue-in-cheek and not as a serious suggestion. But thanks for adding the disclaimer, that's good advice!

duskdozertoday at 8:43 AM

zram swap otoh should be relatively 'free'

show 1 reply
rvztoday at 4:54 AM

> Do not put swap on an SSD you care about at all.

This.

Many people rediscovering what the purpose of swap files are, but will still find a way to abuse it without knowing that they are actually destroying their SSD.