SSDs are way more efficient than HDDs for swap.
SSDs are electronic, while HDDs are mechanical. This means that moving memory regions (pages) between system RAM and the storage requires:
Imagine a scenario in which completely unrelated data access requests floods your storage drive. An HDD needs to constantly realign its needle to the requested locations, while the SSD can just re-route its data lines to that location.
No. AI workloads benefit from SSD’s high random read/write performance. Also, I guess, more people starting using SSDs for paging/swap, as RAM prices skyrocketed.
This resulted in an SSD shortage immediately after RAM starting getting expensive. Which in turn caused an HDD shortage, because people need space to store their data.