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Swapping has been demonstrated to be seriously detrimental to the life expectancy of solid state drives.

Has it? Everything I've read that is not just speculation has concluded that you'd have to constantly write a great deal of data to wear out an SSD, even with a swap partition (or file).

http://serverfault.com/questions/23720/should-you-disable-pa...

SSD drives have substantially longer life than embedded flash drives since they are SLC, meaning each bit is represented by one cell. Embedded flash devices are MLC, meaning each cell represents multiple bits. Your drive's life expectancy goes down dramatically with each bit you try stuff into a single cell.

Are you sure? I thought most non-enterprise SSDs are MLC.

But what's the life expectancy of smartphones and the likes? I wonder if flash storage in them could die so quickly - even before such a device itself would become obsolete.

If it's correct that at least Palm's webOS and Maemo dare to swap on flash storages, we shall see soon...

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