How busy is your SSD?

[Rowsol]

I've averaged 10GB write per hour since getting this drive. I'm wondering if this is considered normal.

 

[TheoneandonlyMrK]

No it's not.

Wow italics do that.

But no it's definitely not normal, you might not be alone but it's still not normal.

 

[maxx2575]

I mean that does look like quite a lot, here's what mine looks like and I download a lot of stuff.

 

[cvaldes]

My usage is far lower, writes are about 0.8 GB (800 MB) per hour for my daily driver Windows PC.

I have several builds and I never put games on the boot drive. The operating system, user account, and regular applications go on the system drive, including things like the Steam Launcher, Ubisoft Connect, etc. Games and media go on auxiliary drives.

Your high usage could be explained if it's your only storage device.

I prefer to keep lots of free space on my boot drive. My daily driver Window PC's boot drive is 13% used. Same percentage used on my Mac mini's SSD.

 

[maxx2575]

also may I ask if that's the only drive in the system?

 

[Rowsol]

I have one spare drive that I store videos on. All downloads first go to this drive.

I tend to do heavy things, such as record gameplay footage, watch movies, and the like. It still seems high though.

I was about to go research ways to drop routine writes to the drive, such as browser settings, but I figured I'd ask here first before I waste my time.

 

[cvaldes]

I have one spare drive that I store videos on. All downloads first go to this drive.

I tend to do heavy things, such as record gameplay footage, watch movies, and the like. It still seems high though.

I was about to go research ways to drop routine writes to the drive, such as browser settings, but I figured I'd ask here first before I waste my time.

Watching movies from a local file is read activity which your SSD does not display.

However if you are streaming movies or video, there is a good chance they are being copied onto your system drive in a buffer before playback. Even if that buffer isn't big, it is constantly being replenished from downloaded data. You can easily verify this by starting Task Manager, viewing Disk Activity on your C: drive, opening up a site like YouTube and noting any drive activity as you watch a video. Try increasing playback resolution to 1080p or 2160p to see how that affects disk activity.

Streaming audio is similar but the bitrate is so low that it really won't contribute much.

Naturally if you download a 10GB movie file, that's all write activity until the download is finished.

As for recording gameplay footage, that's also write activity since you're basically creating a movie file. Depending on how you have your game play capture settings configured, this could be one of the bigger culprits. Just recording your gaming for ten minutes, stop, note the size of the recorded footage and multiple by six for the hourly write speed of that activity.

Unless you are watching streaming video (YouTube, Twitch, etc.) your web browsing activity shouldn't create major volumes of disk writes.

 

[Rowsol]

Actually, now that I think about it, I think the browser writes a lot more than I previously thought. I checked my data usage and windows is showing 500GB this month from my browser. Extrapolate that across 2 years and I can kind of see where it's all going.
I'm still not entirely sure why browsers feel the need to write so often to my drive but it is what it is I guess. I did read about firefox having a setting to slow down writes but all my browser addons work for Brave so that's what I'm stuck with. There are more than a few threads complaining about Chrome writing too much data.

I'll chalk it up to that and not worry about it. Truth be told, SSDs are so cheap now it doesn't really matter.

 

[joemama]

Those amount of read/writes are close to my 3 year old system SSD

 

[mechtech]

I'm sure the first install of windows writes about 30GB the drive in 20 minutes. After that no clue what the avg. should be?

13.1TB written - my main C drive now for about 5 years, maybe 5-1/2 years.

edit - "960 EVO holds its own by boasting up to 200 TBW* for the 500GB capacity model "

hmmmm so about 2.6 TBW/yr, so I should get another 70 years out of it?

 

[cvaldes]

Actually, now that I think about it, I think the browser writes a lot more than I previously thought. I checked my data usage and windows is showing 500GB this month from my browser. Extrapolate that across 2 years and I can kind of see where it's all going.
I'm still not entirely sure why browsers feel the need to write so often to my drive but it is what it is I guess. I did read about firefox having a setting to slow down writes but all my browser addons work for Brave so that's what I'm stuck with. There are more than a few threads complaining about Chrome writing too much data.

I'll chalk it up to that and not worry about it. Truth be told, SSDs are so cheap now it doesn't really matter.

Remember that if you watch streaming video, your web browser is writing to the drive. Naturally any downloads on your browser also contribute to your browser's drive usage total. Sometimes I end up downloading some largish files with my web browser.

People do a lot more things with their web browsers compared to 20 years ago.

I'm not sure what you'd accomplish by slowing down browser writes apart from waiting around longer for tasks to complete. If you want your web browser to write less data, stop doing those activities that write heavily to disk or turn down quality settings so you're streaming 480p video instead of 2160p video.

Or just keep using your computer tomorrow the same way you used it yesterday and not worry about it.

A computer is a tool not a papal treasure.

 

[GerKNG]

i'm at 5.5GB per Hour on my C: Drive.

 

[Rowsol]

I'm not sure what you'd accomplish by slowing down browser writes apart from waiting around longer for tasks to complete

I am referring to this. https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here-is-how-to-fix-it/

 

[cvaldes]

I am referring to this. https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here-is-how-to-fix-it/

Ah, finally something more substantial and not so vague. This is a six year old article about a web browser which is a bit old. Technology changes pretty fast, especially as browser developers are releasing new versions every 6-8 weeks these days it seems like.

Looking at the comments leads to this bug report:

1304389 - Session Restore generates sustained large disk traffic [meta]

NEW (nobody) in Firefox - Session Restore. Last updated 2024-01-27.

bugzilla.mozilla.org

which is still open but severity was apparently reduced per comment 66. The bug is technically still open.

So yes, Firefox still writes to this file but there's some justification given:

"We're not going to compromise on the ability of users to restore after a crash (of either the machine or Firefox). There is still plenty of scope to improve the situation without doing so."

The best thing to do is to use Firefox as you normally would and decide for yourself whether or not it performs satisfactorily for your specific usage case. That's not really a special case for this browser, you should be doing this with any piece of software or hardware for your computer. If you don't like the way it performs, do something else or use something else.

Hell, I don't have Google Chrome installed on any of my computers despite the fact it's the most popular web browser on the planet. I've decided to use other browsers.

For sure, no application is bug free. It's up to you to choose what to live with and what you can do without.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

It is possible but unlikely that you have some high page file usage going on. Can be checked in resource monitor, under the memory tab.

 

[Shrek]

I've averaged 10GB write per hour since getting this drive. I'm wondering if this is considered normal.

Are you running the News and interests widget in Windows 10?
Windows 10 "News and Interests" widget memory leak | TechPowerUp Forums

 

[AsRock]

Maybe try using Resource Monitor. All so Hard Disk Monitor can tell you your current daily usage and total.

 

[maxx2575]

I tend to do heavy things, such as record gameplay footage, watch movies, and the like. It still seems high though.

yep, that'll do it. recording takes a lot more than you would think.

 

[micropage7]

I am referring to this. https://www.servethehome.com/firefox-is-eating-your-ssd-here-is-how-to-fix-it/

Too bad i use FF for work and i realize it takes much resources than next door browsers

 

[cvaldes]

Too bad i use FF for work and i realize it takes much resources than next door browsers

Firefox has a long history for being a resource pig. While they have made progress in cleaning up their act, unfortunately that reputation still lingers in many minds. Remember that the article that Rowsol quoted is from 2016 which is ancient in terms of web browser software development time.

The best thing to do is to have a couple of web browsers on your system and try out a different one periodically. Browser code can get more bloated or optimized over time and each browser development group has had its ups and downs over the years.