Firefox Is Eating Your SSD — Solve It with an Easy Way!

Firefox Is Eating Your SSD

Firefox is a free and open source web browser, developed by the Mozilla Foundation and its subsidiary Mozilla Corporation. First released in 2004, Firefox supports Windows, macOS and Linux. Praised for the speed, security and extended components, Firefox becomes one of the most popular browsers in the world.

However, some people find that Firefox will cause an abnormally high amount of disk operations, which will eat SSD and wear them out or reduce their lifespan.

I am seeing 35-40 GB writes daily. This is excessive. This is only Firefox by the way…No copy paste or installing new apps. Don’t tell me SSDs are meant to be abused like this…None of the consumer grade SSD are made for this much writes and for instance the current SSD I use is guaranteed only up to 75 TB writes (or 5 years) and 39 TB is already used!… –reddit.com

Then, a research confirms that Firefox is indeed writing a huge amount of data in a relatively short period of time to the disk drive for some reason. Depending on what you’ve got open in your tabs, Firefox could be dumping tons of data into recovery.js, cookie* files, or both.

The recovery.js file is Firefox’s session backup file, which is related to the session auto saving feature of Firefox. This feature is enabled by default to save the current browsing session’s state every 15 seconds.

That is extremely useful functionality and is used to restore your browser sessions in case of a browser or an OS crash. But you may have no idea that the session information was so heavy!

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How to Fix This Problem

Some people find the recovery.js file in the following location: C:UsersXaAppDataRoamingMozillaFirefoxProfilesgn523c9n.default-releasesessionstore-backupsrecovery.jsonlz4. And they ask whether there is a way to change the location to an HDD drive.

Obviously, changing the location is difficult, but fortunately, you can solve the problem using other methods. Please follow steps below:

• Open a new tab in Firefox and enter the following text in the address bar: about:config.
• Confirm that you will be careful if a warning message appears for you.
• Enter the following text in the filter box: sessionstore.interval.
• Set the sessionstore.interval to a value higher than 15 seconds (e.g. 60). It means that Firefox will save the session once every 60 seconds and not every 15 seconds!

Of course, you can set the value as your will, but in general the higher the better. Through reducing the frequency with which Firefox writes data to the drive, you can lengthen your SSD’s life.

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About SSD Lifespan

When you buy an SSD, SSD vendors will offer the warranty period and TBW (Terabytes Written) of the SSD. TBW indicates how much data a drive can write over its lifespan. For example, an SSD with 500 TBW means that the SSD can write 500 TB before it needs to be replaced.

To some extent, the warranty period and TBW will indicate the lifespan of the SSD. For example, Samsung 860 EVO 1TB SSD has 5 years warranty period and 600TBW, while Samsung 860 PRO 1TB SSD has 5 years warranty period and 1200TBW.

If the Firefox is eating your SSD frequently, the SSD TBW will be worn out soon and you may encounter SSD failure. To know more about SSD lifespan, please read this post: How to Know Your SSD’s Lifespan and How to Increase Its Life.