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Caution: Firefox can wear out your SSD drive


Thanks for bringing this to our attention, Ged. There is no way I would have guessed that FF could cause 10+ Gigs / day of SSD activity. Wow. I will probably change the setting for the interval as per the recommendation of the article. I use an add-on that will, *when you request it*, manually save your FF tabs and windows, so I certainly don't need it to also be done automatically, especially that frequently.

Thanks again,

Tom
 
Yep I was pretty surprised myself :shocked:

Will be changing to the recommended setting as soon as I get home.
 
Useful information indeed.

I had been using a fairly low capacity SSD (120gb) and 3 weeks ago it failed on me. Yes I do use FireFox (or at least I did). Have to wonder if this was a contributing factor - Fortunatly I didnt keep any vital data on the drive (and anything really important is stored in at least 3 places as well) so not a disaster, but very frustrating.

Thanks for the info.

Cheers

John
 
Another relevant article / discussion here:
http://superuser.com/questions/399473/firefox-writes-megabytes-of-data-per-minute-to-disk-why

A quick read of this seems to suggest that this is a several year old issue, and that this amount of SSD activity may not be as bad as it seems:
"...If Firefox does 10GB of writes in a day, that still only adds up to 36TB of sequential writes in a decade. Even if its such a low end SSD that 36TG sequential writes were a problem, in a decade something else will probably have had the time to die first..."

I don't have much time to dig into this at the moment, but I've been using my present 500 G SSD for a couple of years now with FF running almost all the time, and when I look at the SMART parameters for my SSD c: drive, eg, reallocated sector count, various other error counts, etc., their current values seem to be unchanged compared to their "best" values. This is not the case for the traditional spinning HDs in my system which are showing wear.

Also, I just did a quick calculation and it looks like my c: (SSD) drive activity will be around 30 TB per decade. I got this number by extrapolating the current baseline activity for that drive.

More later. Got to run.

Tom
 
...and FWIW, I did increase my browser.sessionstore.interval from the default 15 seconds to 120 seconds.

T
 
Hi Tom
What SMART utility do you use/recommend (I am on a Mac). I use FF as well and plan to check my settings as well.
 
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Other than my iPhone and iPad, I'm totally a windows guy, so, unfortunately, I don't have any to recommend for Mac users. Sorry.

Tom
 
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