All browsers destroys SSD if you use a lot of streaming

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wyxchari
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All browsers destroys SSD if you use a lot of streaming

Post by wyxchari »

My SSD has suddenly become slow. Investigating I discover that it has started to have ECC errors and it is in the phase of replacing blocks with reserve ones, so it will die shortly and I have already changed it for another. I find that he has a tremendous writing rate that has shortened his life to just 2 years. Looking closely, I discover that when Firefox is used to watch streaming football for example, the Firefox cache records about 100MB / 4minutes or 1GB / 40minutes or 8GB / 3 games. This computer is used daily to watch football games in streaming for about 6 hours a day, so about 8GB a day is recorded in the Firefox cache. I have already changed the Firefox cache to disk D: which is a HDD so that disk C: which is an SSD will not be destroyed again.

And I wonder 2 things whether you have an SSD or HDD:
- What is the point of recording streaming in the cache if it will never be used as a cache since the images and / or sound are never repeated?
- Can Firefox disable the streaming cache by default in future versions and more specifically on SSD disks?

In about:config, you can disable the cache with browser.cache.disk.enable false and change location with browser.cache.disk.parent_directory It would be interesting to disable only the streaming cache and keep the general cache active and located on the SSD without having have to change it to HDD.

This browser cache was invented when internet connections were slow. Now with fiber it is useless and on top of it slows down the HDDs and damages the SSDs.

It happens with any streaming, be it football, YouTube, online movies, music ... in all browsers.
Last edited by wyxchari on January 12th, 2021, 11:41 am, edited 3 times in total.
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DanRaisch
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Re: Firefox destroys SSDs at the hardware level if you watch

Post by DanRaisch »

Have you tried watching the same streams with any other browser to see if this is actually something that can be called a Firefox issue?
wyxchari
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Re: Firefox destroys SSDs at the hardware level if you watch

Post by wyxchari »

DanRaisch wrote:Have you tried watching the same streams with any other browser to see if this is actually something that can be called a Firefox issue?
New Edge also caches streams. The cache should be disabled by default in all browsers or disabled by default in caches that reside on SSD.
It is a problem for all browsers. Firefox has it too. Since Firefox is the browser I use, it is the one that gives me problems.

You're right. Title changed.
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Daifne
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Re: All browsers destroys SSD if you use a lot of streaming

Post by Daifne »

Moving to Mozillazine Tech since this is not just a Firefox issue
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tanstaafl
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Re: All browsers destroys SSD if you use a lot of streaming

Post by tanstaafl »

I agree with you that a disk based cache is usually useless if you have a good internet connection, however I wouldn't expect caching streaming video for 8GB/day to damage your SSD. I've read several articles that claim that nowadays SSDs are typically designed to support at least a 40 GB daily read/write workload over a ten-year period. If you're really concerned you should think about also increasing browser.sessionstore.interval so that session restore stores information less often on the SSD.

A decade ago there were lots of articles that claimed you needed to disable defragmentation, disable most logs, move or disable browser disk caches, buy more RAM and disable page files etc. to avoid wearing out SSDs. They also worried about the windows registry doing too many read/writes. That seems to have died away. https://www.solarwindsmsp.com/blog/ssd-lifespan claims that vendors use three different factors to estimate SSD lifespan: the age of the SSD, the total number of terabytes written over time (TBW), and the drive writes per day (DWPD) but usually its age that matters most.

The simplest explanation might be that either you bought a poor quality SSD or have a fairly old one.
wyxchari
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Re: All browsers destroys SSD if you use a lot of streaming

Post by wyxchari »

tanstaafl wrote:I agree with you that a disk based cache...
They are SSD manufactured in 2009. It is not that they have a lot of use but they are 32GB.
Windows 10 occupies 15GB and together with the reserve space of the system, only about 8GB remain free.
In other words, 8GB are cached every day (futbol streming DAZN) and they are always made in the same free 8GB (1GB of Firefox cache).
It turns out that this is how a 32GB disk inevitably breaks down in just a few months.
Since last week, I have disabled all Firefox caches on all my computers (10) whether they have SSD (32GB or 120GB) or HDD (500GB or 1TB).

Greeting.
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malliz
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Re: All browsers destroys SSD if you use a lot of streaming

Post by malliz »

Sorry in the first example you gave the SSD tech is ancient and most likely on its way out especially with the parameters you have. Even a platter hard drive would be under a lot of stress in that scenario.
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Omega X
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Re: All browsers destroys SSD if you use a lot of streaming

Post by Omega X »

Your SSD is 12 years old. The drive is most likely failing because the NAND cells started breaking down. They last about 10 years in normal use and at a decent temperature.
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