Adjust This Setting Before Firefox Wears Down Your SSD Drive

Firefox browsers are constantly writing large amounts of data to SSD drives, sometimes at higher values than the ones recommended by their vendors for daily writes.

According to the tech experts from ServeTheHome, a Firefox browser in its default configuration can write between 10GB and 30GB per day to SSD drives, depending on the number of opened tabs and windows.

The main two reasons behind these heavy-duty SSD write operations are the recovery.js and cookie.* files.

Sergei Bobik of ServeTheHome , who discovered this issue, says there’s a way to limit some of the write operations for the recovery.js file by tweaking one of Firefox’s settings.

Adjust This Setting Before Firefox Wears Down Your SSD Drive - MSFN

Did you change your settings for both?

Cheers

M4v3r1ck said:

Did you change your settings for both?

Cheers

I have spinners but I did modify the settings as it puts less wear & tear on them. Mine are set to 5 mins & so far, no problems. I'll more-then-likely set them to 30 mins down the road.

Borg 386 said:

I have spinners but I did modify the settings as it puts less wear & tear on them. Mine are set to 5 mins & so far, no problems. I'll more-then-likely set them to 30 mins down the road.

Thanks for the reply. I only have spinners as back-up RAID1 disks.

Cheers

FF doesn't have a "warranty." It's meant as a joke. Chrome has a similar funny warning.

The humor here comes in that Firefox and indeed most software, explicitly comes without warranty,
as is usually stated in bold and or caps in the software's EULA. Hence we're saying their voiding
a warranty they never had, invoking the humor of the absurd.

"This might void your warranty!" is displayed for the English (US) locale.

"Here be dragons!" is displayed for the English (British) locale, and possibly other English locales.

This article has more in-depth look at FF & the amount of data being written.

Firefox is eating your SSD - here is how to fix it

Spotify seems to be much much worse:

Over the last few months, Spotify desktop users on both Mac and PC have noticed the app has been writing massive amounts of data to their storage drives on a daily basis. Reports in the company's own forums, Reddit and Hacker News indicate that tens up to hundreds of gigabytes of data are written on an hourly basis. Sometimes the amount of data exceeds the terabyte mark. Of course, continuing to write that much data over a period of time could affect how long an SSD will last.Ars Technica reports that it was able to reproduce the issue with ease, noting that the Spotify app for both Mac and PC was writing 5 to 10 GB of data in less than an hour. It continued to do so when the software was idle as well. I was also able to observe similar activity on my Mac when streaming songs like I normally would. Some users report in the aforementioned forums that the app wrote as much as 50GB of data even when it was left idle overnight.

Spotifys desktop app writes tons of data to storage drives