Wikipedia seems to suggest that it was just the founder's personal website, and that the "eBay" name is somehow a reference to the ebola virus. Anybody remember more? EBay is one of the few websites back in those days that I heard about through my family instead of the other way around.
The online auction website was founded as AuctionWeb in San Jose, California, on September 3, 1995, by French-born Iranian computer programmer Pierre Omidyar [3] as part of a larger personal site that included, among other things, Omidyar's own tongue-in-cheek tribute to the Ebola virus.[4] In 1997, the company received approximately $5 million in funding from the venture capital firm Benchmark Capital.[5]
It also depends on what type of filesystem you use. A journaling filesystem like ext3 can wear down a disk a lot faster than a non-journaling filesystem.
This is incorrect. Don't put swap on an SSD though, that is really bad; this is probably what the parent poster is mis-remembering.
Information wants to be free.
Information wants to be a ballerina.
1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1.