Do browsers decrease SSD lifespan?

[Surpuppa]

Im thinking of putting Chrome on my SSD because it is often the first thing I open when I start my PC. The thing is, I read somewhere that an SSD has a limited amount of read/writes, do browsers "make" a lot of read/writes? Also, if I download something from Chrome, is it saved on the SSD or can I automatically save it on my HDD?

[Enderman]

No it is fine.

You will die before your SSD runs out of writes.

[tp95112]

You can always change the download location. Chrome does not write a lot to your hard drives only if you are downloading

[waterjug]

you're probably fine putting chrome on your ssd. most ssds fail after billions of read/writes, and it 's not half as much as windows reads/writes. for downloading, you can change the download location in google chrome settings

[waterjug]

honestly your hdd is more likely to break it's arm than your ssd to run out of writes

[dizmo]

It's data based. In the terabyte range. Though, if you have your SSD mostly full, it will die a lot faster.

What do you have on your SSD if basic programs like that aren't on it?

[mariushm]

Your SSD has about 50-80 TB of writes in its lifetime (value for a typical 120GB SSD, so 100-160 TB for 240 GB SSD and so on)

 

A SSD is guaranteed for 3-5 years so you'd basically have to write on the SSD about 50 TB / (5 years x 365 days  ) = 50.000 GB / 1825 days = ~ 27 GB per day.

 

So even with worst case scenario of having only 50 TB of writes, unless you write each day to your SSD more than 27 GB, your SSD will last at least 5 years. That won't happen, even if you're a heavy user Chrome probably won't even get close to 1-3 GB a day.

 

If you're really paranoid, you can invest in a virtual hard drive software, which will create a small hard drive that will store all data completely in RAM, but have the contents of that virtual hard drive in one location on the SSD as well.

Being a hard drive that holds all data in ram, the data would be lost if computer shuts down or power fails. However, the software can be configured to periodically back up the data in ram to the SSD (saving only changes to the data), and if computer crashes or you shutdown your PC, you don't lose any data (and the software loads all data from the SSD to memory when the PC boots up. 

Then, you can configure Chrome to use that virtual hard drive for caching files and downloads and everything.

 

With this trick, instead of writing to SSD every time you access a page (to cache images and content from those pages), the virtual hard drive software will only write once every hour or so (depending on how often you configure it to create backups of the virtual hard drive)

 

 

 

[tekedge]

There were some discussions about this with Steve Gibson on Security Now #580.  His source was servethehome.com

https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/580 [show notes https://www.grc.com/sn/SN-580-Notes.pdf]

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

https://forums.servethehome.com/index.php?threads/firefox-is-chewing-through-your-nand.11346/

[Surpuppa]

18 minutes ago, dizmo said:

It's data based. In the terabyte range. Though, if you have your SSD mostly full, it will die a lot faster.

What do you have on your SSD if basic programs like that aren't on it?

Just Windows for a faster boot time

[mariushm]

With Firefox, I simply moved the Profiles folder (where each Firefox user's data is cached (history, session, cached stuff) to a regular hard drive, and created an invisible redirect to that folder. Firefox still thinks it reads and writes data to that folder, but the operating system redirects everything to the other hard drive.

 

SysInternals MKLINK  creates such invisible redirects, they're functionality built into the operating system and the file system but there's no options in Windows Explorer or built-in tools by default to create them.

 

SysInternals MKLINK:   https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753194(v=ws.11).aspx

 

So I just moved Profiles folder from c :\ Users \ [ username ] \ AppData \ Roaming \ Mozilla \ Firefox\ Profiles  to D:\Programs\Firefox\Profiles

 

and started a command line as Administrator in the folder where I downloaded mklink and then wrote

 

mklink.exe /j c:\Users\[ username ]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles D:\Programs\Firefox\Profiles

 

and afterwards you have a Profiles folder in C: with a semi-transparent icon .. when you double click it, you're automatically redirected to the profiles folder on D:

[dizmo]

5 minutes ago, Surpuppa said:

Just Windows for a faster boot time

You don't even have programs on it? What an odd choice.

[Surpuppa]

5 minutes ago, dizmo said:

You don't even have programs on it? What an odd choice.

Its just 120 gb, but I recently bought it so Im trying to figure out which programs for me to put on it

[dizmo]

6 minutes ago, Surpuppa said:

Its just 120 gb, but I recently bought it so Im trying to figure out which programs for me to put on it

Just put everything that boots with Windows.

They take up next to no space.

[thegoogler]

Yeah putting chrome on your browser is fine, it is just deleting and installing stuff constantly to your SSD which would decrease its life span. But I said constantly so the occasional install and download will be fine.