Browsers eating SSDs? (A ton of unexpected writes with new versions)

[MaxDepth]

Article here: https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here-is-how-to-fix-it/

Opening paragraph:

If you are a user of Firefox we have a must-change setting. Today’s modern multi-core processor systems and higher quantities of RAM allow users to open multiple Firefox tabs and windows simultaneously. This can have an unintended effect for those SSDs as session store data can write data constantly to NAND. This issue is being discussed in a STH forum thread where you can follow the discussion.

EDIT: Not just Firefox but Chrome Version 52.0.2743.116 as well. https://forums.servethehome.com/ind...ng-through-your-nand.11346/page-2#post-108407

EDIT 2: Oops. Looks like this was started in September of last year but something to still be aware of.

 

[Elixer]

Yeah, this isn't anything new, or is it something that a normal user should be worried about.

 

[lxskllr]

Thanks for the info. I'll have to check it out on the computers I manage. My boss uses chromium, usually with the yahoo home page open, so I bet his drive's getting hammered, and no official way to fix it. It's xubuntu though, so there may be some hackery available to correct it if it's a problem.

 

[Carfax83]

You know I've noticed that with Chrome in the past. Every time I used CCleaner to clean my browser history and cache, I noticed that Chrome always had a bigger footprint than Edge. Edge has the lowest footprint of all the major browsers from my experience. Perhaps it's because it keeps most things in memory rather than writing to disk?

 

[Sheep221]

Yep, using firefox on my home rig, has tons of writes on otherwise inactive SSD

 

[mikeymikec]

It is set to 15 seconds by default. In my case, I reset it to a more sane (at least for me) 30 minutes

The guy only navigates to a new page every 30 minutes?

You know I've noticed that with Chrome in the past. Every time I used CCleaner to clean my browser history and cache, I noticed that Chrome always had a bigger footprint than Edge. Edge has the lowest footprint of all the major browsers from my experience. Perhaps it's because it keeps most things in memory rather than writing to disk?

Not a lot of good if it crashes.

 

[A///]

I reduced my writes to under 300 MB a day by adjusting the interval period. The downside is you increase the chances of losing your browser state during a crash or power outage.

For Spotify, I used symlinks through a GUI editor I found on github after looking around. Haven't had excessive writes since.

Can't fix Chrome, though. You can mess with smylinks, but Chrome doesn't seem to like that.

 

[John Connor]

Down with Firefox and Chrome. They are nothing but crap. Pale Moon is where it's at.

 

[Carfax83]

Not a lot of good if it crashes.

I can't even remember the last time Edge, or even Chrome crashed on me. And I am using a preview build. Edge on the preview build is awesome, a lot faster and much better featured. Edge on the Creator's update is going to be exceptionally competitive versus Chrome.

 

[Raduque]

Down with Firefox and Chrome. They are nothing but crap. Pale Moon is where it's at.

I've never gotten pale moon to work correctly. More than half the normal websites I go to are broken, and even turning off the privacy features doesn't fix them.

I use Edge, since I agree with the first two sentences of your post. I don't even use Chrome on my Android devices.

 

[MaxDepth]

I've been using Firefox with ABP and Privacy Badger plugins only. I should check on the usage since I installed Firefox on an SSD. I have a mix of those and rust spinners in my main rig.

 

[Andro Boy]

Good thing I'm on Opera, which as far as I know, doesn't have these issues or the memory bloat that comes with Firefox and Chrome.

 

[XavierMace]

That's because you can't view any pages with content.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I didn't read the article, but it sounds like something that I've run into running BOINC on some of my PCs with SSDs. It has a "checkpoint frequency", set by default for 60 seconds. These programs run 24/7 in the background, and WU sizes vary by project and WU. So, potentially, that's a lot of data per day. Thankfully, the checkpoint frequency is configurable, and I set it to 10 or 60 minutes.

Before I discovered that issue, I used up 25% of a 30GB SSD's lifespan in the period of several months. That would have killed the SSD within a year. Granted, that was on a 30GB SSD, with poor write-amplification, running Win7 64-bit, which takes up most of the SSD's space, so very little spare area to manage writes. So, basically a sort of worst-case scenario for SSD wear.

 

[John Connor]

I've never gotten pale moon to work correctly. More than half the normal websites I go to are broken, and even turning off the privacy features doesn't fix them.

I use Edge, since I agree with the first two sentences of your post. I don't even use Chrome on my Android devices.

That could be the UA. I use UAControl so it looks like I'm using Firefox. Firefox right now is going down a very dark path and is now Chrome. Wait till they ban certain extension versions.

 

[VirtualLarry]

My multi-boot DeskMini, since I re-installed Win10 Pro 64-bit 1607 on my AData XPG SX8000 128GB SSD, CrystalDiskInfo shows:
POH: 894 hours
Host Reads: 722GB
Host Writes: 623GB

Edit: Forgot to mention, I run Waterfox 51.0.1 on this rig.

 

[Raduque]

That could be the UA. I use UAControl so it looks like I'm using Firefox. Firefox right now is going down a very dark path and is now Chrome. Wait till they ban certain extension versions.

Yeah, I don't care. I don't use either browser anymore. Edge on PC and Samsung Browser on mobile.

 

[Shamrock]

I use Firefox on a SATA drive than my OS drive, which is the SSD.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I use Firefox on a SATA drive than my OS drive, which is the SSD.

But where is your Firefox profile directory stored? Not the program directory.

 

[XavierMace]

When are people going to learn to stop freaking out about SSD writes. My current SSD in my gaming rig is a Crucial MX100 that's coming up on 2 years old. 6,100 power on hours, 10.1TB written. That's about 14GB/day. I'm not remotely worried about it. The only recent SSD I've killed is the one being used as a ZIL in my SAN which basically takes the brunt of a dozen OS's which means far beyond what the average user throws at it. Don't buy cheap crap and it's not a problem.

 

[Carfax83]

When are people going to learn to stop freaking out about SSD writes. My current SSD in my gaming rig is a Crucial MX100 that's coming up on 2 years old. 6,100 power on hours, 10.1TB written. That's about 14GB/day. I'm not remotely worried about it. The only recent SSD I've killed is the one being used as a ZIL in my SAN which basically takes the brunt of a dozen OS's which means far beyond what the average user throws at it. Don't buy cheap crap and it's not a problem.

I agree completely. My Samsung 850 Pro is still going strong since I bought it several years ago, and it has 11.5 TB of data written to it according to Samsung Magician. Although I plan on getting a Samsung 960 Pro in the future once the price comes down a bit, even if I didn't decide to upgrade, my 850 Pro still has years of life left.

 

[balloonshark]

I have Firefox setup to run sandboxed with Sandboxie. I have the sandbox container folder setup in a Ram Disc via Softperfect RAM Disc. I haven't really tested it though. I made the change after my 840 evo up and died on me without warning. I figured all the writing to and deleting of the sandbox a few times a day killed the drive.

 

[Shamrock]

But where is your Firefox profile directory stored? Not the program directory.

Not on my SSD, either!

My OS drive is C: (ssd)
My programs drive is E: (sata)

E:\Internet\Firefox is the firefox folder
E:\Internet\Mozilla_Profiles is where my profiles are. Notice I intentionally used Mozilla and not Firefox (as not to get them confused).

 

[13Gigatons]

The real reason to change the settings for this is keep Firefox from stuttering. Anyways 15 secs is probably to low. browser.sessionstore.interval set to 300000.