I’ve recently discovered (through the use of procmon.exe from sysinternals) that both Firefox and Waterfox make a ton of read/writes to the drive. This will wear out SSDs very quickly. My Waterfox installation was writing GBs worth of data to the drive in only a half-hour AND this was while I just left the browser sitting on YouTube. I was not doing anything in the browser and yet still, it manages to write this much data. SSDs do not have an unlimited number of read/write cycles – eventually they wear out. By making the optimizations I will describe in this article, you will be able to make your SSD last a lot longer.
*** NOTE: If you want it really good (but it will be more effort) goto RAMDisk first ***
I always start out optimizing my install by typing about:config in the address bar. Accept the risks and continue. Type in “cache”.
You will see several entries for cache. Disable “browser.cache.disk.enable” and “browser.cache.offline.enable”.
Look for “browser.cache.memory.capacity”. If it doesn’t exist, then scroll to the bottom of the page and select “Number” and press the “+” button. Type in the amount of RAM in KB you want to use. I put mine at 2097152 (so about 2GB, but you can put more. This is more than enough however.)
Now search for “sessionstore” and look for the value called “…interval”. Change that value to a very high number. I put mine at 1800000. This constantly writes the state of the browser to the disk, so incase it crashes, it will restore everything. Just leave it alone if you are worried about crashes not restoring to your most recent tabs. My browser never crashes, so I turn this up super high so it doesn’t keep writing. You can get an add-on to save your tabs with a click at your discretion if needed.
You may now also search for “telemetry” and disable as many of those as you want. Since I’m using Waterfox, all of this is already disabled for me. I recommend using Waterfox instead of FF if you don’t want any tracking.
Search for “datareporting” and disable that.
If you don’t want your browser to save screen shots of your tabs, then search “pageThumbs” and disable it.
RAMDisk:
Now, if you want to make it REALLY good, then download a RAM disk software. I use QSoft RAMDisk, but it is now somewhat defunct, so if you can’t get it, then search for a popular RAMDisk driver. Make your RAM Disk several GB. For me 2GB is enough on a system with 16GB RAM, but if you have more RAM, you can make it bigger. After installing your new RAMDisk, launch either FF or Waterfox with the -profilemanager parameter. To make it convenient, you can copy and paste the shortcut to FF and under “target” on the right-click properties, add “-profilemanager” to the end (after and not including quotes). You can now rename that new shortcut with something like “Firefox Profiles” or whatever you like.
Open up Firefox with the old normal shortcut and backup your bookmarks to a file you specify. You can press Ctrl+Shift+B to open your bookmarks manager. In there you will see “Import and Backup”. Choose that and click backup. Now close FF, wait a sec, and launch that new shortcut, it will give you a window allowing you to setup a new Firefox (or Waterfox) profile. Setup that profile on your RAM Disk. It should be self-explanatory – just follow the steps. You can make it your default profile so it starts up automatically with the old FF icon.
Once you have created a new profile on the RAM Disk, you may go back to the bookmarks window and import the bookmarks you saved. Unfortunately, they will be missing their official icons, but they will still work just fine and as you use them, they will load the new icons one by one. If you use any add-ons, you will need to reinstall them.
OPTIONAL: This part is potentially problematic AND you don’t have to do it, but if for some reason you need your Firefox to be EXACTLY the same as before, you can try this. I’ve had issues with this method, so I recommend skipping it. You may attempt to close FF and copy your old profile from “C:\Users\[your name]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles” and go inside the folder with the random name like default-xxxxxxxxxx. There should only be one or two in there usually. Copy the files INSIDE that folder (not the folder itself), into your new profile folder on the RAM Disk and replace all. Now you can launch FF or Waterfox (with the original icon, if you made your new profile default) and it should be the same as before. It bugged out with my add-ons though and that’s why it’s not recommended.
You’re done. Now your SSD will last forever, so long as you don’t have a bunch of bloatware processes running in the background. I always completely clear my startup items in msconfig. You can look that up.
Other unnecessary things I do with my RAM Disk:
I always set my downloads and temp folders to the RAM Disk. I like having it this way cause then I know that the temporary junk files don’t keep slowly consuming more space. Setting your Firefox downloads folder to the RAM Disk is easy, so I won’t get into that. If you download really large files often, then don’t do it, but for me, I like to have my downloads be temp and if I decide they are good (something I want to keep), then I move them into a proper folder like documents.
You can open the system properties by right clicking “This PC” and going to properties on Win 10. Look for the link on the left called “Advanced System Settings”. In that new window, you should see a button at the bottom called “environment variables”. Look through BOTH lists and change all the ones labeled “TMP” or “TEMP” to the RAM Disk drive letter (usually “B:\”). This will make all the system temp files go on the RAM Disk and they will be automatically cleared each time you deboot the comp. There is no real risk to this. The only scenario that’s problematic is if a program makes a massive temp file like certain installers will copy their content to the temp folder before copying to the program files. IT’S EXCEEDINGLY STUPID, but that’s how some very rare things are – like 1 in a 500 programs. If your RAM disk is bigger than the software, it will work anyway.
