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!

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!

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

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.

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

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

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.

spixelspixel · 31 Mar 2018 at 16:52

TheVoice said:
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?

spixelspixel · 4 Apr 2018 at 11:05

TheVoice said:
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 · 4 Apr 2018 at 11:09

jpaul said:
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.

spixelspixel · 4 Apr 2018 at 11:50

TheVoice said:
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.

jpaul said:
(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.

spixelspixel · 4 Apr 2018 at 16:42

jpaul said:
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.