Best kind of hard drive for heavy use?

[RW]

On Thu, 15 Sep 2016 17:24:46 +0200
Ralf Mardorf via freebsd-questions wrote:

> On Thu, 15 Sep 2016 16:10:26 +0100, RW via freebsd-questions wrote:
> >The important thing is that everything that can't (or shouldn't) be
> >discarded has to fit into swap+ram. Most desktops/workstations have
> >much more memory than they need, in which case you can safely
> >allocate swap plus most of the ram to tmpfs, if you want to.  
> 
> Ok, I didn't use FreeBSD since a while ago. On my Arch Linux, if the
> tmpfs is full, swap isn't used ...

I don't know why your particular system didn't swap, but that's not
true in general, e.g.:

https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/filesystems/tmpfs.txt

"tmpfs puts everything into the kernel internal caches and grows and
shrinks to accommodate the files it contains and is able to swap
unneeded pages out to swap space."