nice find.

It'll take at least 25 years for daily 10GB writes to wear down a good SSD. People are way too paranoid about reducing SSD writes. By the time you will wear down a SSD by Firefox use, it will be severely outdated. The time you spend trying to reduce SSD writes is really better spent elsewhere. Your SSD is more likely to fail from another cause than maxed out write cycles anyway.

ZellSF wrote:

It'll take at least 25 years for daily 10GB writes to wear down a good SSD. People are way too paranoid about reducing SSD writes. By the time you will wear down a SSD by Firefox use, it will be severely outdated. The time you spend trying to reduce SSD writes is really better spent elsewhere. Your SSD is more likely to fail from another cause than maxed out write cycles anyway.

I seen a few sdd's ware down in less then 3 years. it can happen fairly fast on cheap ones.

ZellSF wrote:

It'll take at least 25 years for daily 10GB writes to wear down a good SSD. People are way too paranoid about reducing SSD writes. By the time you will wear down a SSD by Firefox use, it will be severely outdated. The time you spend trying to reduce SSD writes is really better spent elsewhere. Your SSD is more likely to fail from another cause than maxed out write cycles anyway.

It took all of 1 minute to adjust that value in about:config, so I don't see it as time better spent elsewhere. I like my hdds to last forever if possible. In 20 years you may want to use that SSD in a Win7 retro PC. 😉

Why not use Firefox portable?

It should have all those options out of the box.

Zup wrote:

Why not use Firefox portable?

It should have all those options out of the box.

good call.

ZellSF wrote:

People are way too paranoid about reducing SSD writes.

This.
I've been using my SSD to do Blu-ray to MKV muxing. It's much faster. The average MKV size is around 28GB, and I have over 400 BDs. All of that lossless MKV writing is just part of the torture my poor SSD gets subjected to.

Even with their limited write cycles, I'd trust an SSD with a 50TB recording job more than I'd trust a platter.

For me the issue is with web browsers being wasteful and inefficient with their write strategies, whether SSD or mechanical disk. Basically, it's very easy for these browsers to write over 20GB per day sitting there doing nothing, which approaches the limit of some lower-end SSDs. If I have an option to improve that efficiency and be less wasteful with my writes, and it's so easy to do, then why not?

I bet Mozilla responds to this in some way, so that future versions will be more write-thrifty without users having to tweak any settings. But for now, the option to tweak is there for those who are interested 😀

Jade Falcon wrote:

ZellSF wrote:

It'll take at least 25 years for daily 10GB writes to wear down a good SSD. People are way too paranoid about reducing SSD writes. By the time you will wear down a SSD by Firefox use, it will be severely outdated. The time you spend trying to reduce SSD writes is really better spent elsewhere. Your SSD is more likely to fail from another cause than maxed out write cycles anyway.

I seen a few sdd's ware down in less then 3 years. it can happen fairly fast on cheap ones.

A lot of SSDs fail in short time, but not due to exceeding write limits. If you have a SSD that ran out of write cycles after 3 years, it was faulty from the day you bought it. Even if it wasn't, doesn't spending a few dollars more for a drive that'll last 10 years more make more sense? Do you really want to tweak your system so you can store data on a drive you don't trust?

clueless1 wrote:

ZellSF wrote:

It'll take at least 25 years for daily 10GB writes to wear down a good SSD. People are way too paranoid about reducing SSD writes. By the time you will wear down a SSD by Firefox use, it will be severely outdated. The time you spend trying to reduce SSD writes is really better spent elsewhere. Your SSD is more likely to fail from another cause than maxed out write cycles anyway.

It took all of 1 minute to adjust that value in about:config, so I don't see it as time better spent elsewhere. I like my hdds to last forever if possible. In 20 years you may want to use that SSD in a Win7 retro PC. 😉

In 20 years you can buy the highest end SSD available today for next to nothing.

clueless1 wrote:

I bet Mozilla responds to this in some way, so that future versions will be more write-thrifty without users having to tweak any settings. But for now, the option to tweak is there for those who are interested 😀

Not sure which part is more hilarious here, the one about Mozilla listening to users or the ones where Mozilla is supposed to care about something which all research points to not being a problem.

And Firefox has been HDD intensive for ages. It's why I used to use Opera (when it wasn't a Chrome skin), it's why my USB Linux stick copies my Firefox profile to a ramdisk whenever I boot it. It isn't likely to change now, especially not at the cost of a feature that makes sure user data isn't lost.

FWIW, the default in Pale Moon is 60000 (although it forked off an older FF version).

Another tweak to add with Memory cache instead of Disk cache.

I don't have an SSD, but I'm glad you posted this. 😀 Hopefully this should make Cyberfox a bit faster on my laptop.

I knew Firefox was a hog on HDDs and SSDs but didn't know that it was that Bad! With that many writes can easily waste TLC based SSDs pretty quickly, I really hate how Firefox has become so storage dependent and bloated over the years which is such a shame.

nforce4max wrote:

I knew Firefox was a hog on HDDs and SSDs but didn't know that it was that Bad! With that many writes can easily waste TLC based SSDs pretty quickly

Why do you say that? The lowest rated SSD I could find for purchase today was rated at 60TBW, and all the research I could find indicate that SSDs exceed their TBW (but often die of unrelated reasons). It would take forever for Firefox to waste a drive doing that.