Firefox is chewing through your NAND

[NoSpamSam]

Would love to hear of any tips for Chrome. My family leaves 10-20 tabs open just about every day, and then walks away from the PC without closing them. (You should see what our Desktop looks like too, but I digress). I have about 1 TBW/day (yes, *1 TB*) to my SSD. Process Monitor shows the following folders are written to almost every second:

c:\users\<my name>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache\data_n (where "n" is 0 or 1)
c:\users\<my name>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cookies-journal

 

[enigmaxg2]

As far as I know, only Firefox has a way to mitigate the problem, so that and the lower resource usage of it makes me to recommend switching to it and dicthing hogChrome.

 

[cesmith9999]

looks like spotify is now on this list

Spotify is writing massive amounts of junk data to storage drives

Chris

 

[keybored]

Wow... 5-10GB per hour is quite a bit. Does look like they fixed it though; they just need to make the update available to everyone now.

 

[snadge]

Iam having this issue...Chrome definitley has the problem too - I have used Chrome for about 90% of the 2 years Ive had my 250Gb 850 EVO and I have 32TB written, SSD-life reported 2.5GB of writes in ONE HOUR just researching this issue in Firefox with 5 Tabs open and Cache in RAMdisk

I wonder if ALL browsers are affected if Edge and IE do it... what about Opera or Safari?

 

[NoSpamSam]

The Great Suspender, a Chrome add-on, helps with this problem. If a tab is inactive for a defined amount of time it suspends the tab. My disk activity has gone way, way down after adding this to Chrome.

 

[snadge]

does the add-on exist for firefox? just im using RAMdisk for its cache to limit writes, Chrome doesnt work most of the time and reverts to saving the cache on the SSD

 

[NoSpamSam]

Doesn't look like the author wrote a product for Firefox, but bartab and UnloadTab and Suspend Tab are potential options.

 

[snadge]

Fix the majority of the problem by using RAMdisk and installing the Portable version of any Browser in RAMdisk, this allows it to have its cache and profile folders in RAM, it also speeds up page-loading (even from SSDs)

I have this issue on all browsers (Firefox, Chrome, Opera), Firefox is most definitely the worst and even changing the interval it still writes excessively when I am using RAMdisk as its cache, I also have Opera Portable installed in & running from the RAMdisk with its cache & profile folder in there too, while the writes are considerably less than Firefox, it still writes to my SSD when I load pages???

If I let it sit idle it gets the odd 60KB spike every 2 seconds or so, if I close the browser(s) and let it settle, it doesn't stop writing too the SSD, but does so much less than having a browser just sitting open... and like I say if I keep clicking link after link in pages (in Opera too, but much less than Firefox) it does constantly write too the SSD even though the cache is not in the SSD (I have verified the RAMdisk cache is working)

Firefox is so bad I've had to stop using it, I've not tried the portable version of Firefox and Chrome as I was quite happy with the massively reduced writes using Opera portable in RAMdisk, now I use circa 7-10GB per day (all day on PC) whereas before all these changes it was 15-20GB (using SSDlife Pro to monitor write usage and task manager to monitor real-time writes to C-drive)

Below is a list of the files that are constantly writing in Windows 10 when the system is idle, these increase when the browser is actively being used even though its installed in RAMdisk with its profile folder in there too, this leads me to believe the spikes caused by browsing use is related to the wifi. (I have correct driver installed)

Unistore
EVTX
Datastore.db
SOFTWARELOG1
Wifi.etl
UserNotPresent.etl
UsrClass.Dat.Log2
$logfile

I notice on my Windows 7 install it does not write too the SSD at all...!! this seems to be unique to Windows 10, I've even uninstalled Cortana, disabled live tiles, Search, Indexing and loads of other things to try and stop it.

 

[AjvarXX]

FYI here is what taking most of the writes in Firefox profile.
P.S. Notice webappstore files which take huge size of writes? They didn't exist in 2013-th when I listed files which are being rewritten a lot.
P.P.S. It's funny to read now how back-in-then some baboon-like spitted against this information.

Oh how I love these raging bring out the pitchforks and torches stories where a single person with an isolated problem tries to gather all the masses and burn down somebodies home.
I have all 3 of the major browsers and use all 3 of them daily and FF has not been working my disk more than any other.
Chances are since your such an "uber tweaker" *cough* and have all these fancy settings that you assumed would do you some good you actually broke your FF and corrupted how it worked or set something wrong.
It could be as easy as some spyware/malware working overtime as well that you do not know about.
Software issues are tested and proven by volume testing and isolating the root cause, not by an isolated incident that you have no case to be presenting and even less a case to be prosecuting

 

[Akshat]

What about the writing of data to the profile folder mainly to the sqlite file. Does changing or moving the profile folder location worth or does it affect performance?

 

[quintessence]

Sorry for dredging up this thread but didn't find a more recent relevant one.

So I started checking HWiNFO a lot more regularly and noticed that Chrome was writing 70 GB per day to my SSD because I watch a lot of YT and Twitch streams. Often I'll be watching two or three streamers simultaneously. Even if I stop watching video in Chrome, (GPU video-decode acceleration enabled, btw) it seems some tabs in Chrome are writing up to 1 GB per hour. I've now installed Firefox and moved the firefox profile over to a spinning magnetic drive. Doing the same intense video viewing activity in Firefox seems to write a lot less to the drive than Chrome. I'm pretty upset with Chrome and it's overall leakiness. It seems to seriously chew through NAND far more than Firefox. Despite the briefness of my testing, I recommend Firefox over Chrome for streaming video with respect to SSD NAND wear.

Now I have 62.1 TB written to my SSD over two years and SMART reports 89% drive life remaining. I hope the wear-levelling in this Samsung SSD will protect me for at least 10 years more now that I've switched to Firefox and project only 10-15GB per day of SSD writes.

I may have to use the Great Suspender extension to chrome as well, to minimize further writing. Will report back on its effectiveness if I have to do this.

Edit:
Found this in chrome://flags
Turn off caching of streaming media to disk.
Reduces disk activity during media playback, which can result in power savings.

I wish I knew about that flag earlier. Has anyone tried it?