[uncledave]

I don't think this is realistically an issue unless you have heavy server workloads which constantly blow the memory ceiling of your node and then hammer it hard. Hammering it as in actually actively writing and reading from the pages of memory in swap, which is also difficult as MRU pages are should be kept in RAM. At that point you really should be monitoring it and stick some more memory in it anyway. For end users desktops and laptops it'd be pretty hard to kill a (quality) drive dead in under 10 years at the moment based on longevity estimates even with some swap usage.

This is one reason I went with an 8Gb RAM Mac recently. If I go into swap territory occasionally it's not really a big issue. As yet as a terminal node, which is what it really is, I barely ever touch swap even with a ton of things open.