The biggest difference is, files can become fragmented while partitions don't. On a hard drive this can make a big difference. On an SSD I would tend not to use a swap partition or file. If you use a swap partition on an SSD it would confine the writes to a smaller area of the disk and wear it out faster. So a file would work much better because it has the whole disk to even out the writes. But you do a lot of swapping that also puts more wear onto the SSD. So I would tend to put my swap on a hard drive.

On Wed, Oct 28, 2020, 8:57 AM Seabass via PLUG-discuss <plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org> wrote:

I tend to prefer swapfiles.
Doesn't require a partition, so it can be resized easily and won't require you to know the partition number. (Opinion: fewer partitions is just easier)
It is encrypted swap when on a fully encrypted drive without needing more partitioning work.

I don't actually know a reason to make swap a partition over a swapfile. I imagine there is a partition setting somehow or maybe the inability to resize is desirable, but that hasn't been my use case before.

To be fair though... I don't use hibernate so don't really need a swap either. So it is rare I'd need it anyway.
------------------------------
Message: 2
Date: Mon, 26 Oct 2020 21:22:57 -0700
From: Jim <azanorak@gmail.com>
To: plug-discuss@lists.phxlinux.org
Subject: swap file vs swap partition
Message-ID: <4613ab4d-61b5-34b0-4944-d0917cec234e@gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Regarding swap file vs swap partition: Is one better than the other?
When I installed Kubuntu on my machine, both options were available and
I chose the swap file. The OS is installed on an SSD---------------------------------------------------
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