Guide on how to move Firefox to secondary drive.

spixelspixel · 9 Jun 2013 at 01:52

Over the past few days I've been trying to figure out how to completely move firefox to another drive to reduce writes on my ssd. I know the impact on the ssd will be minimal but it still bothered me as I use firefox a lot and resource monitor shows it constantly writing even more than windows itself.

Here's a quick and easy guide from what I've learned. This cut the daily writes to my ssd in half from 14gb to 7gb.

1. Move the Cache.
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Type about:config in the firefox address bar.

Right click anywhere and select new string. Enter browser.cache.disc.parent_directory and select ok. In the next box enter the location of your other drive, for example D:\
It you enter something like D:\firefoxcache then you will need to create that folder beforehand, it doesn't make one automatically.

2. Move your firefox profile.
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Go to C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles

Move the folder (for example jkwhcnsajs.default) to your new drive location.

Go to C:\Users\(username)\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox

Open the 'profile' configuration file.

Change 'Isrelative' from 1 to 0
Change 'Path=' to the location which you moved your profile to. For example D:\Firefoxprofile\jkwhcnsajs.default

Save and close.

Firefox will never wite to your main drive anymore!

apeksdiver · 9 Jun 2013 at 01:56

I have been moving things off my SSD to free up space and that will definitely be of use, thank you.

Manbatius · 9 Jun 2013 at 15:24

Thank you for this, I have a 30gb SSD, which was fine when my pc was just being used for media duties. However now it is my main pc and anything to get stuff off the SSD is important until I can upgrade.

Sat with about 200mb free atm!

spixelspixel · 29 Mar 2018 at 09:31

I stopped using this tweak a few years ago after reinstalling windows, didn't bother to use it. Well guess what, my ssd died most likely due to the massive amount of writes from firefox. If you have more than 1 drive definitely put your firefox profile on another drive to even out the writes. Firefox and windows writes a lot to your drive and will kill it eventually. My SSD health is still reported as 100% health even though it is out of spare blocks so don't rely on the smart info, put your browser files on another drive!

jpaul · 29 Mar 2018 at 11:07

You can also decrease the frequency of autosaves for crash recovery from default (was it 15s) that was established as main culprit (places/sessionstore files ) - see earlier posts
and tell it to use ram for caching of bitmaps.
the former, I found, makes it a lot more responsive too (which moving profile alone will not) since you are avoiding slowing it down for IO (even if some are a asynchronous/threads)

spixelspixel · 29 Mar 2018 at 11:21

jpaul said:
You can also decrease the frequency of autosaves for crash recovery from default (was it 15s) that was established as main culprit (places/sessionstore files ) - see earlier posts
and tell it to use ram for caching of bitmaps.
the former, I found, makes it a lot more responsive too (which moving profile alone will not) since you are avoiding slowing it down for IO (even if some are a asynchronous/threads)

The history + cache still writes a very large amount even with the the crash recovery changed. If you look at the screenshot I posted originally, the highest write is from places.sqlite which is history. Session store is third

marc2003 · 29 Mar 2018 at 11:31

I have a 250GB 850 EVO as my OS drive and IIRC, it's rated for 75TB worth of writes over 5 years. I've used nothing but firefox and have re-installed windows more times than I care to remember (keep dabbling with 10 and then going back to 8.1

).... and so far, I've written 13.5TB in 2 years and 3 months. That's nothing so I'll just continue as I am. If it fails, it fails. I have backups so wouldn't lose anything.

spixelspixel · 29 Mar 2018 at 11:46

marc2003 said:
I have a 250GB 850 EVO as my OS drive and IIRC, it's rated for 75TB worth of writes over 5 years. I've used nothing but firefox and have re-installed windows more times than I care to remember (keep dabbling with 10 and then going back to 8.1 ).... and so far, I've written 13.5TB in 2 years and 3 months. That's nothing so I'll just continue as I am. If it fails, it fails. I have backups so wouldn't lose anything.

The endurance stats mean nothing,I've experienced that first hand. This is my faulty ssd. Everything seemed fine then all of a sudden it went faulty. 850 evo will probably last longer than my sandisk extreme ii but you best believe that the writes from your browser is really having an impact on the ssd lifespan.

jpaul · 29 Mar 2018 at 12:11

spixelspixel said:
The history + cache still writes a very large amount even with the the crash recovery changed. If you look at the screenshot I posted originally, the highest write is from places.sqlite which is history. Session store is third

Are they ordered by bytes total during that 1s period ? ... having a discrete/small png in the list is odd.

just looked and surprisingly chrome is currently my bad guy

the 160Kb/s you have is much bigger than 64Kb/s ff I have, more significantly - over the 4day session ~ 50 tabs has been open, average is 3Kb/s total 12GB, if my calc is right.
edit suppose
edit: computer is asleep 10 hrs a day, so probably more like 6Kb/s avg

marc2003 · 30 Mar 2018 at 08:12

spixelspixel said:
The endurance stats mean nothing,I've experienced that first hand.

They're relevant for my warranty. It's 5 years or 75TB written - whichever comes first. I'm clearly not going to break the 75TB barrier any time soon so if the drive fails in the first 5 years then I should be able to RMA it. If the drive pops after 5 years even with the data written being much lower than the advertised rate... then so be it. It was bought back in the good old days when they were 60 quid.

spixelspixel · 30 Mar 2018 at 08:30

marc2003 said:
They're relevant for my warranty. It's 5 years or 75TB written - whichever comes first. I'm clearly not going to break the 75TB barrier any time soon so if the drive fails in the first 5 years then I should be able to RMA it. If the drive pops after 5 years even with the data written being much lower than the advertised rate... then so be it. It was bought back in the good old days when they were 60 quid.

Still if you moved the browser off it, the ssd could last 10 years instead of 5. Its not nice having something go faulty out of the blue and go through the hassle of getting a replacement knowing it could have been prevented

I've got my browser on an el cheapo 64gb ssd now having put in a new main drive.

I guess its not that much of a big deal though if it was 60 quid, my one was almost 300, for 480gb in 2013

marc2003 · 30 Mar 2018 at 09:05

Yep, late 2015 really was the peak time to be buying SSDs. I'm pretty sure after I bought my first one for 60 quid, it got reduced to 50 on special offer the next week. :rolleyes:

Then a few months later, prices started getting silly like 90 quid on OcUK so I bought another locally for 75. Roll on 2 years... £110. Madness....

I suppose given today's prices, I should be more considerate.

TheVoice · 30 Mar 2018 at 11:02

I'll just continue as-is, for me the whole point of having a fast SSD is that the entire system benefits from that performance.

jpaul · 30 Mar 2018 at 20:56

marc2003 said:
Yep, late 2015 really was the peak time to be buying SSDs

noticed OC seems to have 500gb evo 850 at £120 - not bad.

... putting the windows swap on the cheap ssd, if you do lots of multi-tasking, maybe more important than FF,
have never looked to see how many read/writes are down to the OS.

edit afterthought

spixelspixel said:
the highest write is from places.sqlite which is history.

if it is genuinly this that has most actvity it may be corrupted eg
I generally do not keep more than a couple of months of history - places gets large with lots of writes/stalls when it is updated.

spixelspixel · 31 Mar 2018 at 15:41

jpaul said:
noticed OC seems to have 500gb evo 850 at £120 - not bad.

... putting the windows swap on the cheap ssd, if you do lots of multi-tasking, maybe more important than FF,
have never looked to see how many read/writes are down to the OS.

edit afterthought

if it is genuinly this that has most actvity it may be corrupted eg
I generally do not keep more than a couple of months of history - places gets large with lots of writes/stalls when it is updated.

Firefox updates the history every time you visit a site, so have task manager resources open on disk activiity, open a website and watch all the writes by places.sqlite. The screenshot I posted isn't average writes its current after loading a site. This was taken in 2013 though so firefox may have been adjusted a bit but still, if you browse for hours daily firefox will cut your ssd lifespan in half

spixelspixel · 31 Mar 2018 at 15:48

TheVoice said:
I'll just continue as-is, for me the whole point of having a fast SSD is that the entire system benefits from that performance.

You can get the same performance and prolong the lifespan by putting your browser profile on a cheap secondary ssd

MagicBoy · 31 Mar 2018 at 15:48

You'll banjax performance by moving it to an spinning disk. Why not use a RAMdisk?

spixelspixel · 31 Mar 2018 at 15:56

MagicBoy said:
You'll banjax performance by moving it to an spinning disk. Why not use a RAMdisk?

Better yet, a small ssd. Using a 64gb for the browser + some additional storage. Won't take up ram and won't vanish after a shutdown. Only costs ~30 pounds and will greatly improve the lifespan of your main ssd.

MagicBoy · 31 Mar 2018 at 16:08

Yeah that'd work. An old small SSD as a scratch disk in effect.

A RAMDisk could be pretty easily set to sync against permanent storage in the background.

TheVoice · 31 Mar 2018 at 16:17

spixelspixel said:
You can get the same performance and prolong the lifespan by putting your browser profile on a cheap secondary ssd

My 960 Evo was £100, it doesn't make sense to spend £30-40 on another SSD just to marginally prolong the life of it. If it fails in 5 years time I'll just buy whatever's current at the time.

If Firefox was writing tens or hundreds of GBs to it each day then I'd be more concerned, but having sat with Task Manager and Resource Monitor open in the background for the past hour or so the disk usage is completely fine.