Swap (and hibernation) on SSD in 2019?

Solution 1:

Todays SSD are much larger than they were 4 years ago, making the write cycles involved from hibernating less significant for wearing.

Modern SSD come with 100-300 TBW (terabytes written), i.e. are guaranteed to be able to write 100-300 TB before they fail. This seems to be be plenty but consider that with each hibernation you may write up to the whole amount of RAM you have built in. Each hibernation will in the worst case write 16 GB of data on a laptop with 16 GB of RAM.

A SSD with 100 TBW will then last for

100.000 : 16 = 6250 hibernate cycles
4 hibernations a day makes this 1562 days or
4,3 years

Note that during these 4 years we just hibernated. We had not written anything else on the SSD.

Of course the kernel compresses RAM before writing, there are SSDs that come with 300 TBW or more, we may only want to hibernate once a day, or we have 4 GB of RAM only, so the time span until the drive fails may be much longer.

Still today, hibernating contributes significantly to the the write load on a SSD. Booting from SSD will not write much of data on the other hand. For low RAM machines that don't hibernate too often the life span of a modern SSD may be sufficient.

Solution 2:

When I bought my SSD (not a top brand), the manufacturer's usage life estimate suggested I might expect an eighty year lifetime based on a reasonable write activity, even when using the drive for swap as well as OS and data storage.

SSD hardware hasn't gotten worse in the four years I've had mine, so you should be fine treating your SSD as you would have a platter drive ten years ago, with an expectation that it will outlast a similar capacity platter drive if not abused.

Compared to ordinary in-use swap, hibernation is nearly no usage at all -- so even in 2015 there ought to have been no problem with then-current hardware.