Firefox Can Shorten Your Life of Your SSD

imcold on 26/10/2016 - 22:39
Last edited 26/10/2016 - 22:39

I came across an article recently how Firefox can slowly kill your precious SSD

https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here…

You might have noticed a nifty feature of firefox which enables it to open up a bunch of windows that you was viewing immediately after a crash? You wonder how it works? Well it creates a cache of the open pages and it does so every 15 seconds. As a result around 12gb of writes can be done to your SSD each day. Just through firefox

Changing this cache time from 15000 ms to a higher number say 150000ms will decrease the wear and tear on your SSD and firefox will even run faster.

There are also articles out there how to change the cache directory of Google Chrome so it doesn't use your C:\ drive.

Computing

Comments

  • OzBozo on 26/10/2016 - 23:21

    Don't the super geeks run Windows on SSd and other crap on hard drive, and run 2 drives and still get the SSd speed feeling

    • Davo1111 on 27/10/2016 - 01:15

      yes, but you'd probably run firefox on your SSD.

      Anyway the cache amount is negligible.

  • tonyjzx on 26/10/2016 - 23:36
    +6

    I believe there's a similar article for chrome.

    Thing is 20gb isnt any big deal for any ssd, even the cheapest sandisk… and even if it runs 20gb a day, you're still talking hundreds of years before it reaches mbtf… and then you're talking about a $50 ssd.

    I think out of all the SSDs I've seen and used, I think I've only worn out two SSDs down to a 99% health level, according to their own tools and these were heavy daily use machines.

    The two ssds were $150 in total. I would not be keeping my only copy of whatever important files on them though.

    • cwongtech on 26/10/2016 - 23:51

      Supposed to be 10 years MTBF for 3D nand.. 20GB is a lot :|

  • Oofy Doofy on 27/10/2016 - 00:22
    +7

    Lol, by the time it wears the SSD significantly, it'll be worth little to nothing anyway. Don't worry about it.

    • RJK on 27/10/2016 - 04:43
      +1

      Pretty much this!

      I thought these kind of "omg you'll wear out your SSD!" stories were a thing of the past. Apparently not.

  • scrimshaw on 27/10/2016 - 00:29
    +3

    http://www.pcworld.com/article/2856052/grueling-endurance-te…

    If you are using a decent enough SSD, you shouldn't be worried about a daily use of 10GB of data writes a day.

    Assuming that FF writes 12GB a day, in a year that amounts to 4.3TB, and in 5 years that's 21 Terabytes, which is really nothing in the grand scheme of things. A budget Sandisk Ultra SSD can handle 170 TiB before kicking the bucket, and the Samsung 840 Pro continued to function well after the 2 Petabyte mark.

  • Davo1111 on 27/10/2016 - 01:11
    +2

    I've been using the same SSD for years, and i checked the total bytes written and it was 30TB.

    According to this graph the earliest dies at 100TB.

    I'm not worried at all. cache away

    • fruit on 27/10/2016 - 11:14

      How do you check that?

      • Davo1111 on 27/10/2016 - 12:07

        Cant remember exactly what i used, but it was a SMART monitoring software. then i had to converts the bytes written into TB.

        The simplest way would be to use a program like these

  • CyberMurning on 27/10/2016 - 07:09
    +5

    came across an article recently how Firefox can slowly kill your precious Ssd.

    Using your ssd will also slowly kill it…
    Just keep it wrapped in the box.

  • fruit on 27/10/2016 - 11:14
    +2

    Clickbait

Login or Join to leave a comment
Login Join