Thunderbird on SSD?

[qwertycsy]

Hi guys, I have been using thunderbird for years but I am new to this forum. Anyway, recently I have got a new SSD for my laptop and I wonder if I should not run thunderbird on that SSD, as you know, SSDs have a limited number of "writes" and it appears to me that thunderbird writes quite frequently. If I have another slot on my laptop I will certainly move my beloved thunderbird to a conventional 7200rpm spinner but the sad fact is my laptop having a slim design can accommodate only one harddisk. Any insight about thunderbird on SSD?

[rsx11m]

In general, I'd assume that SSD drives (or their drivers, if not the file system on it) are optimized for not using the same sectors (or locations on the chip in this case) again when overwriting files with new content. Thus, as long as the disk is large enough there should be plenty of space to distribute file activity over the drive. Keep in mind that also conventional hard drives are subject to wear and tear as they contain mechanical parts which eventually may break, thus avoiding unnecessary disk usage for those may be a good idea as well.

There are a couple of functions which certainly increase disk use: The global indexer for the search database; synchronizing messages locally for IMAP accounts; and, using the disk cache for messages and remote content.

Thus, you could switch those off if you don't need it, in the Options or Account Settings (from the Tools menu or the [≡] button on the toolbar):

1. Uncheck "Enable Global Search and Indexer" in the Advanced > General tab of the Options window (this will disable the global search, but you still can use the "Search" function from the right-click menu of a folder or the Quick-Filter bar normally).
2. In the Synchronization & Storage tab of the Account Settings, uncheck "Keep messages for this account on this computer" (this setting is per account and will result in messages to be refetched from the server more frequently).
3. In the Advanced > Network & Disk Space tab of the Options window, set "Use up to [__] MB of space for the cache" to "0" (neither message parts nor remote content will be stored on the disk for later use, e.g., after restart, but still will be held in the memory cache).

Thus, you can minimize disk usage to some extent, but in the end it's a trade-off with features and performance.

[tanstaafl]

How much free memory do you have?

One really crude hack would be to create a 50MB RAM disk, and after booting run a batch file that copies to the RAM disk a "profile" stored on the SSD that has a full directory layout but ONLY files in the root of the profile (prefs.js, abook.mab etc.) and the add-ons directory, and then launches Thunderbird with command line arguments that specify the profiles location. i.e. The "profile" on your SSD wouldn't have any mail, and has just the bare essential files.

You'd need to rely upon using IMAP accounts with offline folders disabled, global search disabled, and the disk cache disabled to minimize the downloading to be just your accounts headers. Downloading headers is usually pretty quick, and you could unsubscribe folders that you rarely use (so their headers aren't downloaded). That would avoid any writes to the SSD and doesn't require you to also have a hard disk. You'd need to modify the desktop shortcut that launches Thunderbird to use command line arguments to specify the profile. "C:\Mozilla Thunderbird\thunderbird.exe" -profile "D:\My TB profile"

This crude hack might be practical if you rarely change your add-ons, settings, or address book. Especially if you normally use sleep mode rather than powering off at the end of the day.

The (free) SoftPerfect RAM disk at http://www.softperfect.com/products/ramdisk/ supports both 32 and 64 bit versions of windows and seems to let you create very small volatile RAM disks. The help for adding a disk uses a 200MB RAM disk as its example. It has a Mount as Removable checkbox to prevent Windows from creating Recycled or System Volume Information folders on the disk and a file systems list box to format the disk with the desired file system. http://www.softperfect.com/products/ram ... g_disk.htm

[user2037]

Anyone tried using an in-memory cache instead? It appears Firefox has one: http://windows7themes.net/firefox-memory-cache-ssd.html

[rsx11m]

Setting browser.cache.disk.enable to false works fine for me. Increasing the memory cache as suggested should be a good idea in this case, the preference in question should be browser.cache.memory.capacity though (by default, the size of the memory cache is determined as a fraction of the installed RAM of the system it is running on).