Does heavy web browser usage kill SSD’s?

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[Tex265]

Again while getting up to speed on SSD’s, I ran across numerous internet articles regarding how hard numerous read/write/erase cycles are on SSD longevity.

I use the internet a lot during the day for business (many 1 time look ups) and reference guides, as well as music, news, videos, some TV.

Something I never considered before was the significant amount of disk activity generated by internet usage as “everything” that opens goes onto and thru the disk.

Including side displays, pictures, music, side videos, the actual internet content, advertisements, and full videos (researched for and you tube watched – as well as their other suggested videos.)

Also recorded are History files, Internet Caches, Cookies, Logs, Recovery Stores, Tab Restores that keep all that has been opened, etc, etc.

Those sites recommend trying to “minimize” as much of this activity as possible by turning off stuff that you don’t absolutely need/utilize including minimal  tabbing and restricting the Cache size, even moving it onto a secondary HDD or “disposable/replaceable SSD.

Would appreciate others opinions/thoughts/comments and what steps, if any are you employing?

Windows 10 Pro x64 v22H2 and Windows 7 Pro SP1 x64 (RIP)

• This topic was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by Tex265.

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[Ascaris]

I have two SSDs that are used intensively every day. One is my system disk and the other  is used for large weekly backups involving deletion of older backups. I have had both for over 6 years. Hard Disk Sentinel App shows % life remaining as 99% and 98% respectively. Looks pretty reliable and safe to me!

My Rig: AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12-Core CPU; ASUS Cross Hair VIII Formula Mobo; Win 11 Pro (64 bit)-(UEFI-booted); 32GB RAM; 2TB Corsair Force Series MP600 Pro 2TB PCIe Gen 4.0 M.2 NVMe SSD. 1TB SAMSUNG 960 EVO M.2 NVME SSD; MSI GeForce RTX 3090 VENTUS 3X 24G OC; Microsoft 365 Home; Condusiv SSDKeeper Professional; Acronis Cyberprotect, VMWare Workstation Pro V17.5. HP 1TB USB SSD External Backup Drive). Dell G-Sync G3223Q 144Hz Monitor.

• This reply was modified 1 year, 4 months ago by Ascaris. Reason: HTML tags removed

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because your SSD is 2TB!!! the more free space, the longer it lasts.

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Again while getting up to speed on SSD’s, I ran across numerous internet articles regarding how hard numerous read/write/erase cycles are on SSD longevity.

First, kudos to you for doing your homework and asking questions. However, I really wish this nonsense would go away. Or at least that the authors would have the journalistic integrity to put it all into proper perspective. And for sure, they need to date their articles.

Yes, it is absolutely true that numerous write cycles (not read – no impact, and forget about erase – insignificant) impact longevity. So be very careful. If you write (save) several 100 gigabytes of data every single day, 365 days a year for the next 10+ years, you will wear out your SSD!!!! I say again, 100s of gigabytes, every day, for the next 10+ years.

Those sites recommend trying to “minimize” as much of this activity as possible by turning off stuff that you don’t absolutely need/utilize including minimal  tabbing and restricting the Cache size, even moving it onto a secondary HDD or “disposable/replaceable SSD.

Then those guys are ignorant idiots who have failed to do their homework, or they are basing that advice on early editions of the first generation of SSDs from 20 years ago.

Am I being sarcastic? Very! Am I being truthful? Absolutely!!!!

Understand even busy data centers are more and more often using SSDs to cache their most frequently accessed data.

Do also note that SSDs are ideally suited for Page Files. See Support and Q&A for Solid-State Drives and scroll down to, “Frequently Asked Questions, Should the pagefile be placed on SSDs?” While the article is getting old and was written for Windows 7, it applies to W10/11 too and even more so today since wear problems of early generation SSDs are no longer a problem and each new generation of SSD just keeps getting better and better.

Why would so many manufacturers use only SSDs in today’s laptops, tablets, even PCs if they were going to wear out soon? And do those authors seriously think thing all the PhDs, computer scientists, and engineers doing the development at Microsoft are stupid?? Or worse, that they are smarter than all those experts?

Windows knows how to manage SSDs just fine. LEAVE THE DEFAULTS ALONE!!!!!

Bill (AFE7Ret)
Freedom isn't free!

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IT Manager Geek, WSbobby-p, NaNoNyMouse, b

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With images and backup plans in place, why should anyone care?

It’s extra overkill with newer SSD’s and operating systems, however, I have a mix of older and newer SSD’s on different systems that are used for different things.

I set the firefox network-cache to RAM years ago to avoid SSD writes and continue to do so and never needed to changed it at all on multiple systems, 4Gb System RAM or greater on Win Pro 7, 8.1, 10 and 11 as well as various Linux distro’s.
System RAM access is far quicker than an SSD to read/write albeit volatile.

With your browser closed, you can try by saving your existing prefs.js within your firefox profile before making changes for re-introduction if you decide it’s not suitable for your browsing habits/needs.

Within about config:

browser.cache.disk.enable

set to FALSE

browser.cache.memory.enable

set to TRUE

browser.cache.memory.capacity 

set to -1

NOTE: -1 = automated by browser/OS which is my preference for stability.

browser.sessionstore.interval

is set to 30000000 (1/2 hour) here to minimise writes to the SSD.

Then restart browser.

NOTE: One caveate is, if the browser misbehaves, you’ve lost your browsing history even though it’s very seldom in my experience, just an informative warning.

Windows - commercial by definition and now function...

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RetiredGeek, windbg, satrow

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Microfix wrote:

With images and backup plans in place, why should anyone care?

If the unit in question was, say, a Macbook Pro, they will have paid a lot of money for a laptop with a non-replaceable SSD, which is to say they bought a high-dollar disposable computer. Even if the service life of the NAND is nominally quite good, you can see how having a non-replaceable SSD ticking down the life of the entire unit could have a psychological effect on its user.

On my PCs, if an SSD dies during the warranty period (generally 5 years), I would send the old one back and pop a spare in and restore the backup image onto it, and use it like that until the replacement SSD arrives. Not much difficulty, and not a whole lot of down time. Swapping a SSD is about the simplest mechanical operation possible on a laptop, once you get the bottom cover off.

If the SSD dies after the warranty ends, I would take the opportunity to evaluate the new options and see if I need/can get a bigger one for a reasonable cost. If not, I spend ~$150 and buy a new one, restore from the backup, and I am back in business.

If I had an Apple laptop (or one of the “let’s copy everything Apple does” wannabes like Dell with their latest generation XPS 13), I’d have a shorter warranty than five years, and I would have to send the entire unit in for repairs. No swapping the SSD and continuing to use it! And if it was out of warranty… prepare to spend a lot of money to buy another disposable premium computer.

That is why I would never buy a laptop with only a non-removable SSD (unless I was getting a massive discount compared to a comparable unit with a swappable SSD). No gimmicks like touch bars (Apple ditched theirs, but Dell’s copy lives on), and it must have a headphone jack and a user replaceable battery that can be swapped in about 5 minutes.

Since I do use replaceable SSDs, I don’t worry at all about them and their service lives. My first SSD is still in great shape, and I bought that about ten years ago. It is a smaller unit, 128GB, which makes its nominal service life shorter just by virtue of having half the NAND cells of a 256GB. Each time you double the capacity of the SSD, you double its nominal service life too.

Even though that old SSD (Samsung 840 Pro) is small, it still has plenty of life in it. It is in my mostly retired desktop PC, but for many years I just hammered this thing. I had 8GB of RAM back when Firefox was at its most voracious in terms of memory usage, and I typically have a massive number of tabs open at any given time, so I was hitting the virtual memory hard, all the time, day in, day out, for years.

It was the speed of the SSD alone that prevented the system from slowing to a crawl when the memory pressure rose.

I used the Microsoft/Sysinternals tool to show the amount of RAM that had been paged out, and it had been swapping some pretty high priority stuff. It starts out reclaiming caches and buffers, dropping those where it can, and then it begins paging out the lowest priority data still stored in physical RAM. If that is all gone and the unit is still under memory pressure, it will swap higher and higher priority stuff to give programs the RAM they request. Swapping high priority stuff as mine did shows that it was not just using the page file, but that it was hammering it. It was writing monstrous amounts of data to that SSD.

If my SSD had been a HDD, it would have slowed the system to a crawl, thrashing the hard drive mercilessly. The SSD made it so it was not much of a perceptible slowdown.

I also tended to do a lot of things like when I let it upgrade to Windows 10 to see what it was like, then (after deciding I did not like it) having Windows roll itself back to 7, testing it out to see how well the rollback worked (I could not detect any issues, FWIW), and then restoring from backup anyway just to be certain. After that, I installed Windows 8.1, and then Linux on the SSD.

I would often take risks (knowing I had backups) and end up breaking things, more or less so I could try to fix it. If I grew weary of trying, I would restore the backup. I did that a lot.

So how is the drive?

It has 4 years, 11 months of uptime, and now has 67% of its rated life remaining. It is already more or less obsolete by virtue of its slow SATA speed and its outdated 2.5″ form factor, not to mention its small capacity, but it is still alive with another 20 years of heavy use to go,at the rate it was going before.

I would not worry about the SSD unless it was in a unit where it was not replaceable, and I would never pay decent money buy a PC with that configuration. It would have to be discounted by at least 75% before I would even consider a unit with a soldered SSD. If I am getting a disposable computer, I expect it to cost disposable prices.

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windbg

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You could just read the real world SSD tests.
https://techreport.com/review/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-two-freaking-petabytes/

cheers, Paul

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Cybertooth, TechTango

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Paul T wrote:

You could just read the real world SSD tests.

and

https://www.askwoody.com/forums/topic/ssd-endurance-questions/

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Yes, web browsers write several gigabytes per day if you use it all day, or even, to some extent, if you just leave the browser open all day. Everything (html, css, js, images, even video) is written to disk. In addition, periodic session store and SafeBrowsing updates can add up to gigabytes per day.

My 64 GB SSD was finished after 10 years of everyday browser usage. But a larger SSD will last longer.

SSD endurance also depends on the memory type, SLC, MLC or TLC.

Nevertheless, I’d recommend that you just get the most out of your SSD, enjoy it’s speed, and just replace it when the time comes.

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ive had a number of mid grade 1TB SSDs and of the four I bought at one time, two of them already bit the dust. I do a small amount of video editing a month and mostly browse the web and play a video game or two.
Neither of those drives should have been getting errors two years in based on available data, but they did.

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phototransformations

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Mid grade, as in forgeries? Or just meh?

Heavy browser usage, as per the Topic?

Maybe too frequent drive/browser ‘cleaning’?

Whatever, any decent SSD will last, take bumps and general abuse and put a smile on your face.

I have 1TB SSDs that have 7+ years hard usage and zero errors, am expecting the 4x 1TB M2s in daily use now to outdo them.

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“Whatever, any decent SSD will last, take bumps and general abuse and put a smile on your face.”

This hasn’t been my experience.

The first computer I had with an SSD, a 256GB Sandisk in a Dell laptop, has been great — still has 82% life left after 5 years. On the other hand, the Crucial 2TB drive I installed in a newer computer failed its own diagnostics out of the box, and the 2TB Samsung 990 Pro I replace it with failed after 10 months. It would get very hot randomly and then crash the computer, which could not find the drive on reboot. I had to shut down the computer, wait a few minutes for it to cool off, and then it would boot and run fine … until it didn’t. It had 11 TBW at the time.

So far, the WD SN950 I replaced it with has been fine.

Concern about the drive wearing out prematurely may not be warranted, but they are not always as reliable as they are described to be and when they fail, they can fail dramatically.

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You bought a 990 Pro with 5 years warranty and then paid for a different one instead of claiming under warranty?

cheers, Paul

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No, I made a warranty claim, but the computer is a laptop and I needed to keep using it during the month it took Samsung to theoretically resolve the problem.

I say theoretically because they returned the drive rather than replacing it. They erased it and re-flashed the firmware. Period. As I had already erased the drive and the firmware was up-to-date, I have zero confidence this drive is “repaired.” I documented the problem and instructions for how to re-create it and also sent them a log file that identified bad blocks the drive had not corrected and that either were caused by or created the overheating and crashes, but they did not attempt to replicate the problem.

It seems Samsung will not replace a drive unless there is a catastrophic failure. I’m not willing to use a drive that sporadically fails until it finally fails catastrophically.

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