I monitored these stats over the next couple of weeks and this behavior stayed consistent. Since I didn’t recall downloading any huge files over the previous day or visiting any new sites that could’ve resulted in bringing down a lot of new content to the cache, this puzzled me. In my case, SSDLife notified me that 12GB was written to the SSD in one day. For those of you unfamiliar with this tool, it simply reports estimated lifetime for the attached SSD and it also shows the amount of data read and written. Purely by chance, I fired up a free copy of SSDLife on two consecutive days where I haven’t really used my workstation for anything other than email and browsing. Observing the Issue: Heavy SSD Writes from Firefox This issue is being discussed in a STH forum thread where you can follow the discussion.
This can have an unintended effect for those SSDs as session store data can write data constantly to NAND.
Today’s modern multi-core processor systems and higher quantities of RAM allow users to open multiple Firefox tabs and windows simultaneously. If you are a user of Firefox we have a must-change setting.
