This Early Access pirate game was quietly killing your SSD without you knowing

"A misconfigured database cache was driving writes of over 108GB per hour​

According to reports, Windrose players were experiencing unusually high I/O workloads in specific in-game situations. The game was reading and writing large amounts of data to disk, with spikes of up to 30MB/s when the player's character was roaming around a base. I/O operations would slow down when the character was standing still, but could worsen when the player was steering a corsair ship.

During normal game sessions, Windrose was writing around 108GB of data per hour. Traditional HDDs likely had no trouble handling that throughput, but SSDs are a different story. NAND Flash chips can only be written a limited number of times, and modern QLC drives are even more vulnerable to sustained I/O workloads in typical consumer setups.


Some users investigated Windrose's abnormal storage behavior further. The issue apparently stemmed from the RocksDB database system Kraken Express chose for saving player progression. Windrose was running three separate RocksDB databases with a very small cache budget, which was quickly exhausted, forcing frequent write operations to disk."

https://www.techspot.com/news/112271-early-access-pirate-game-quietly-killing-ssd-without.html

Ouch, especially during the RAMpocalypse. I remember Windows doing the same thing a long time ago, constantly filling up event logs with GB's worth of data.

Dang. I've only put an hour into the game and its on an older sata ssd.

I was just writing something about that. I've seen other sites comment sections where people say it's no big deal. They don't get what the real world endurance is like. Especially on an older sata SDD from 5+ years ago. The 256 and 512GB drives get pretty worn down and iffy after about 25-30 TBW. This game could do 10% of that in 20 hours.

Advil said:

I was just writing something about that. I've seen other sites comment sections where people say it's no big deal. They don't get what the real world endurance is like. Especially on an older sata SDD from 5+ years ago. The 256 and 512GB drives get pretty worn down and iffy after about 25-30 TBW. This game could do 10% of that in 20 hours.

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Even on a newer drive I'd be pissed. While they claim fairly high TBW, I don't know if I'd want to test that or see what their performance was like. Consumer SSDs do well because it is a read-intensive load. I would not be happy about something thrashing that much data.

Advil said:

I was just writing something about that. I've seen other sites comment sections where people say it's no big deal. They don't get what the real world endurance is like. Especially on an older sata SDD from 5+ years ago. The 256 and 512GB drives get pretty worn down and iffy after about 25-30 TBW. This game could do 10% of that in 20 hours.

Click to expand...

Is this true? I have a bunch of 850 and 860 EVOs (250GB and 500GB) with 70+TBW (a few at 110+TBW) that have no issues

It's not a hard rule and older Samsung drives tended to hold up far better under high write losds but years ago those Samsung drives could also have been 30-50% more expensive so they were far from the most common choice for home end users. Most people didn't assume they'd be super high write load because of a game. It was usually a matter of the Windows swap file always being the worst of offender.

I just know where id start to get nervous with older, small generic SSDs based on where id have to change them out.