Guide on how to move Firefox to secondary drive.

[spixelspixel]

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.

It's not marginally tbh, it will double the lifespan. My 480gb sandisk extreme was killed in just over 4 years of daily use and that was with a drive that had a 3 year warranty. And around a year of that, I had the firefox on another drive but the other 3 years it was exclusively on the ssd that died. The most alarming part is the health was still reported at 100%, people rely on those stats to guess how long more their ssd will live but its complete nonsense. The ssd which had the firefox profile for a year accumulated ~13TB of writes just from firefox as it was a secondary drive and almost nothing else wrote data to it.

Its a good idea if you ask me and the storage can be used for other things too. Firefox (and any other browser) is writing tens of gb a day if you're a heavy browser, have you been adding it up?

 

[jpaul]

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.

as he says, the data I posted shows me at 4GB/day, so that makes just 7.3TB over 5 years.

collect some data on your total writes per day (as opposed to instantaneous rates) and see what your total will be
(repeating - if it is excessive then may need to tune the options - since ff will be slower too, as a result of all this)


If you read this this and similar information, older drives die irrespective of data written, so unfortunately we are unlikely to get 8 years out of an expensive drive,
seems like a better stategy to just pay for the drives with the longer guarantee period, but maybe evo's are just 5/3 60% more than sandisk ?

I understand the pain of a failed £300 drive after 5 years , £60/year sounds a lot.

It was bought back in the good old days when they were 60 quid

re-reading your comment - that was a 250gb though ? (2 years ago my 850 evo 250gb was £65 I think) ... you can get 500GB for close to £100 now - good old days are back ?

 

[TheVoice]

It's not marginally tbh, it will double the lifespan. My 480gb sandisk extreme was killed in just over 4 years of daily use and that was with a drive that had a 3 year warranty. And around a year of that, I had the firefox on another drive but the other 3 years it was exclusively on the ssd that died. The most alarming part is the health was still reported at 100%, people rely on those stats to guess how long more their ssd will live but its complete nonsense. The ssd which had the firefox profile for a year accumulated ~13TB of writes just from firefox as it was a secondary drive and almost nothing else wrote data to it.

Its a good idea if you ask me and the storage can be used for other things too. Firefox (and any other browser) is writing tens of gb a day if you're a heavy browser, have you been adding it up?

You're just inventing numbers based on a single experience though, you've got no evidence. If we're comparing anecdotes, I've got a 5 and a half year old Crucial M4 that had Firefox installed to it for the entirety of that time and it's still fine (although no longer in use).

I know there have been issues with Firefox and other apps writing to SSDs excessively in the past, but I'm not seeing any indication on my system at least that the issue is still present. Certainly nothing that's making me want to go out and buy another SSD in order to save writes to the one I already have.

 

[Duke]

When I bought my first SSD years ago I just got Firefox to put cache into the RAM rather than to disk.

 

[lurkio]

you could try using firefox portable, I have it and my other browsers on a HD (instead of my SSD)

Oh and I have set my disk cache to zero

 

[spixelspixel]

You're just inventing numbers based on a single experience though, you've got no evidence. If we're comparing anecdotes, I've got a 5 and a half year old Crucial M4 that had Firefox installed to it for the entirety of that time and it's still fine (although no longer in use).

I know there have been issues with Firefox and other apps writing to SSDs excessively in the past, but I'm not seeing any indication on my system at least that the issue is still present. Certainly nothing that's making me want to go out and buy another SSD in order to save writes to the one I already have.

Not inventing numbers, I have an ssd that only had firefox on it for a year and can see how much was written to it. Complete opposite of inventing. You don't know how long is left on the life of the crucial though. Mine seemed fine with 100% health reported until it suddenly failed, and I know for a fact ~half of the writes to it came from firefox.

And theres many websites that tested it as well. If you are a HEAVY user, say you browse hours every day and leave firefox open all the time, you will write 10's of gb a day

 

[spixelspixel]

as he says, the data I posted shows me at 4GB/day, so that makes just 7.3TB over 5 years.

collect some data on your total writes per day (as opposed to instantaneous rates) and see what your total will be
(repeating - if it is excessive then may need to tune the options - since ff will be slower too, as a result of all this)


If you read this this and similar information, older drives die irrespective of data written, so unfortunately we are unlikely to get 8 years out of an expensive drive,
seems like a better stategy to just pay for the drives with the longer guarantee period, but maybe evo's are just 5/3 60% more than sandisk ?

I understand the pain of a failed £300 drive after 5 years , £60/year sounds a lot.



re-reading your comment - that was a 250gb though ? (2 years ago my 850 evo 250gb was £65 I think) ... you can get 500GB for close to £100 now - good old days are back ?

What kind of browsing do you do for 4TB though and how long is firefox open for. Also I'd have doubts over process explorer accurately tallying up the data. In Windows resource monitor, a lot of the writes from firefox are classed under 'system' rather than firefox.exe

My drive failed due to to running out of spare blocks, so enough blocks became faulty to the point they couldn't be replaced. Imo this points towards wear from writes rather than age. The ssd is still working but obviously I couldn't rely on using it anymore.

 

[jpaul]

(4GB/day yes) .. ff history had 300 entries yesterday, maybe spread across 30 sites, over 12 hours
..I do use noscript+clicktoplay, even with a SSD/4core/8gb, without those, can chew up cpu resources and ability to multi-task with MS office and other tools.

not sure what process explorer maybe missing ? (paging to swap would be categorised under system)
https://social.technet.microsoft.co...stem-process-is-too-high?forum=winserverfiles
(although it includes network I/O - I don't upload much)

 

[spixelspixel]

You're just inventing numbers based on a single experience though, you've got no evidence. If we're comparing anecdotes, I've got a 5 and a half year old Crucial M4 that had Firefox installed to it for the entirety of that time and it's still fine (although no longer in use).

I know there have been issues with Firefox and other apps writing to SSDs excessively in the past, but I'm not seeing any indication on my system at least that the issue is still present. Certainly nothing that's making me want to go out and buy another SSD in order to save writes to the one I already have.

(4GB/day yes) .. ff history had 300 entries yesterday, maybe spread across 30 sites, over 12 hours
..I do use noscript+clicktoplay, even with a SSD/4core/8gb, without those, can chew up cpu resources and ability to multi-task with MS office and other tools.

not sure what process explorer maybe missing ? (paging to swap would be categorised under system)
https://social.technet.microsoft.co...stem-process-is-too-high?forum=winserverfiles
(although it includes network I/O - I don't upload much)

You also have crash recovery turned off + other mods? That would explain your low usage. For a typical user however who just installs firefox and browses away, it will use much more than 4gb a day imo.

 

[jpaul]

crash recovery is on with reduced frequency

For a typical user however ...

you are not either .. I want a reponsive/fast computer, optimizing that, happily avoids need for a 'sacrificial' ssd
maybe if I had to make a lot of IO eg database work, I might consider isolating that activity on a dedicated ssd.

 

[spixelspixel]

crash recovery is on with reduced frequency

you are not either .. I want a reponsive/fast computer, optimizing that, happily avoids need for a 'sacrificial' ssd
maybe if I had to make a lot of IO eg database work, I might consider isolating that activity on a dedicated ssd.

Well I browse a lot for various things, news, shopping, travel, netflix etc. Rarely turn off pc or close down the browser completely, usually left running in the background. I'd say a lot of ocuk members fit into that type of usage.

Adding a second small ssd isn't sacrificial. It's the combination of windows + heavy browser usage that will limit a ssd lifespan, but alone its not so bad. So if you put a browser on a 2nd sdd, it won't take up much space so you'll have storage for extra things, but will also even out the writes so neither ssd is taking the brunt of it.

 

[jpaul]

so how much data are you writing a day ? (vs the 300 history pages I said)
.. .. does netflix inside ff (as opposed to app), use regular firefox locations for any cached data ?

 

[spirits247]

As mention above, Firefox can be set to use a memory cache only and even set the size of the memory cache in about:config for example:

browser.cache.memory.capacity 131072
browser.cache.disk.enable false

Also mentioned previously, for the sake of say 128MB RAM, you can setup a RAMdisk using something free like DataRamdisk that saves on shutdown and move Firefox's browser profile to that.

I tend to use mklink so large browser updates still take place on the SSD eg

mklink /J "%LOCALAPPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[Profile Name]" "[RAMDISK FOLDER OF YOUR CHOICE]"
mklink /J "%APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[Profile Name]" "[RAMDISK FOLDER OF YOUR CHOICE]"
mklink /J "%USERPROFILE%\AppData\LocalLow\Mozilla" "[RAMDISK FOLDER OF YOUR CHOICE]"

Ram is faster than SSDs, so you lose no performance but prevent lots of small writes and write amplification. Also all the data written during watching videos online.

You can pretty much move anything with mklink.

With modern SSDs most likely a complete waste of time, but old habits die hard and saving a few TB a year on an expensive SSD makes me feel....better somehow.