Many eeePC installations recommend some precaution while formatting the internal SSD drives with ext3. Most articles warn that the continuous writes of journaled file systems or swap spaces might trash eventually the drive. I too chose a setup with ext2 and no swap partition on my netbook.


Robert Penz tries to dispel some of the prejudices around SSD drives, where he states that with a 2 million cycle at 50MB/sec you'd still get a life cycle of 20 years.


Interesting read, but I don't buy all arguments - he makes some good remarks, though I think the truth lies somewhere in the middle :
- first of all, Robert probably accepts figures from enterprise SSD disks, which are a different quality level than the regular SSD drives found in netbooks.
- I really would like to see results from writing over the same block over again and again, a life cycle of 20 years is imho in those conditions impossible.
- mis-configurations can fill up logfiles pretty quickly, so yes, netbooks can experience heavy writes too.


Does it makes such an overall difference ? Hell, SSD drives are pretty fast, so fsck's are also. My Linux boxes are pretty stable, I still haven't seen my netbook crash, forcing a fsck, despite some moments of heavy usage or sudden battery drains. If I would be forced to reinstall my eeePC, I still would go for the same setup. Maybe a swap partition would be handy, but an additional 1GB disk space on 20GB is a nice tradeoff for some memory gain.