"I did not find the article you reference but did find some descriptions of 
SSD memory having lifetimes of order 100,000 to 1,000,000 writes which 
many claimed implied a lifetime of order 10 years."

It's probably fine for most people who aren't running data-intensive apps. 
With swap to disk, a user pretty much has to stop what they are doing when
they run out of RAM.  With flash, a machine that just didn't have enough
RAM could be swapping all the time, and it would seem tolerably responsive.

On Linux one can look at the swap device in /proc/diskstats and compare the
swap device's counts with the update and get an estimate of writes per unit
time.  For a server or workstation that might not be a bad estimate
provided the machine gets lots of workloads and is up for extended amounts
of time.  

"I was really interested in the hybrid SSD/HD systems and found even less 
about them."

There seems to be a lot of variance in the results for Linux kernel
(software) solutions.  I'm just getting started with bcache.  The popular
Linux distributions don't yet have the right kernels to make this
experimentation convenient, but hopefully in the next month or so.  

Marcus

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