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I have an old ThinkPad E540 that suddenly shut down on Windows 7 in the fall of 2019. The 1TB HDD reported a fault and the laptop immediately shut down allowing me to later retrieve the data with a live Ubuntu usb. Quite a useful feature from Lenovo, though momentarily scary. And the timing worked out as Win7 was reaching end of life anyway, and I had no intention of switching to Win10. The SanDisk U110 16GB SSD caching drive had been reporting faults for a while, but I ignored it as it wasn't a critical component.

I recently acquired a Kingston A400 480GB SSD to replace the HDD and install and upgrade to Ubuntu 22.04 from my 18.04 usb. I'm considering using the U110 caching drive as swap as I really don't like placing swap-partitions on main SSDs. Which brings me to my question:

Do SSD caching drives have features that make them unsuitable for swap? And should Ubuntu (or Linux?) be able to handle any "bad sectors" in swap?

sudo smartctl -i /dev/sdb

sudo smartctl -i /dev/sdb results

MostlyRational
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    You should not use any failing drive for anything really, let alone swap. This will result in frequent lockups, freezes and all sorts of errors. Ubuntu has used swapfiles instead of the traditional swap partition for many years now. I strongly suggest you don't deviate from the standard installation. SSDs now have an expected lifespan equal or better that the best HDDs so don't worry about swap and I mean at all, period. – ChanganAuto Dec 10 '22 at 16:48
  • Thanks! I just saw that swap files were an option from some other questions as well. I guess I'll just have a bit of risky extra storage space until I can afford to replace it. – MostlyRational Dec 10 '22 at 17:12
  • Ubuntu will use any swap partitions it finds at boot. To check this type `free` in Terminal. Using a broken drive is not the wisest thing though. Check /etc/fstab to see if a swapfile is specified. – C.S.Cameron Dec 11 '22 at 02:58

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