Why and how webbrowsers eat up your hard drive

[Rockin Robbins]

Seems to me that the fix is just to turn session restore off entirely. How often do you actually use session restore? Once a month?

But the other thing to keep in mind is that the recent SSDs have an expected life longer than the mechanical hard drives we trust so much. All those writes have minor significance and might reduce your SSD life to only six years or so! Yes, that's a catastrophe, but on the scale of one to ten it rates about a 3.

Your SSD shouldn't be the place Firefox keeps its files anyway! That's what mechanical drives are for. SSDs are for keeping operating systems so they boot fast. EVERYTHING else should be on mechanical hard drives. Then your SSD is very minimally written to and it will live for ten years after it is tossed in the trash because it's obsolete. Think about it. What do you do when you happen across a perfectly working 80GB parallel hard drive from 2003? Do you test it to see how good it is? Do you thank your lucky stars for this precious find? No, you toss it in the trash, same as you will do with a perfectly working SSD of only 120GB that you find five years from now. All these guys will be in the trash long before any browser writes cause any problems.

The research will find all browsers do the same thing, other than maybe Konqueror, which nobody runs (they're missing a real treat!). The worst will be Chrome. Unless the Microsloth browsers are playing Parcheesi with themselves when they're supposed to be doing DNS searches. Parcheesi takes up a lot of disk space.

In the meantime, Firefox is still the best browser out there. It's so customizable and so useful it stays on my Microsloth and Linux machines.

[BarracudaUAK]

Originally Posted by Rockin Robbins

...
What do you do when you happen across a perfectly working 80GB parallel hard drive from 2003? Do you test it to see how good it is? Do you thank your lucky stars for this precious find? No, you toss it in the trash, same as you will do with a perfectly working SSD of only 120GB that you find five years from now.
...

Personally I keep them and use them to test other/newer versions of Linux (example, trying a newer version of Fedora/Ubuntu to see how the newer kernel/drivers work) without having to wipe out my current functional install.

Also keep some around in case Friends or I need a place to dump all our old demos/mods/patches in the event (with Windows) one of us needs to do a "wipe and reinstall".

I started playing with PCs when available funds barely covered the games. I never junk ANY working hardware.

Might be why I still have a WORKING Tandy 1000RL, 8086 I think, a 386 SX/25, a IBM PS/1 486 SX/25 with a DX 33 chip installed, and a 486 DX2/66!
Sometimes I like to go back a play the old stuff!

Still I don't like SSDs personally. To many different possibilities for failure.

I have read of failure due to: "rotting" themselves to a read-only state, total drive failure (not just lost data) due to power loss, and eventual, un-powered data loss.

I've got 3.5inch floppies that are 25 years old that still have the data on them...

Currently using 4 7200 rpm HDDs in RAID0 and getting anywhere from 765MB/sec, down to 400MB/sec (at the "end" of the drive). All the SSDs only show 450-600MB/sec.

They take a few seconds to spool up, but after that, I literally wait for nothing, I ask, and it is done. (I wanted SCSI/SAS 15K RPM drives, or at least 1TB WD Raptors, but the SCSI drives weren't available locally, and the Raptors were $400-$600 each! )

Maybe when they improve SSDs, come up with some way to write the data "permanently" without losing the ability to rewrite, and/or "discharge" the drive, so operation of the drive isn't destroying the drive, then I'll probably get one.

On the other hand, I have those 4 2TB drives for ~$80-$85 each, a 2 TB SSD, the lowest I found was $1,000... SSDs would need to get cheaper too.

And there is always the hilarious, weird looks I get from people when they hear all the fans, HDDs and CD/DVD/Blu-Ray Drives spool up on boot.
It's like it's coming to life, and it almost scares them. I've had a few people take a step back before! "Uhh, is it safe?"


Barracuda

P.S. I use Konqueror from time to time as well....