[adrianmonk]

Swap may or may not be obsolete, but I don't find this particular argument on the subject convincing.

When dealing with swap, continuous transfer rate of the hard disk is not the relevant metric; seek time is.

In my experience, when the system starts needing to read a lot of pages back in from swap, it tends to do so in more or less random order. It reads a small amount of data, then it seeks to a new position, then reads another, and so on.

(I also find the argument unconvincing for a separate reason: I think hard drives are somewhat obsolete. Even my home system has flash instead of swap. And flash has a massively better seek time.)