Hey fellas, I have a PC I use mostly for watching streamed content from YouTube, Twitch and Amazon. The NVME drive I use is a 512GB Inland from microcenter I bought back in 2019. As of 2021 I leave this machine on 24/7 so I can watch shows or streams as they come up. I've noticed since about 2024 the drive's health has been degrading slowly since then. I mostly use both Firefox and Vivaldi and under the details tab in task manager they can show very large numbers under I/O write bytes sometimes up to 50,000,000,000 or more after some time of watching streamed content. I usually go days without closing the browser. My question is are streams causing the drive to slowly loose more health? For the time being I redirected cache to my D: by editing the target section of the exe with --disk-cache-dir="D:\Vivaldi-Cache". Not sure if it helps but this machine is running Windows 10 and has been the initial install from back in 2019.
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Are streams killing my NVME?
- Thread starter alf717
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Interesting I guess the drive is just going out on its own? Maybe power on hours or something.
I have 16GB of RAM in this PC but I never seem to go above that limit useless I'm playing a game.
Probably not related but I did have an HDD drive go out on me last year. I found a very large indexing cache file that was over 70GB so I turned that off completely. I try to stay around 200GB of free storage on this drive but for some reason I tend to lose a few GBs every time I go to that limit. It's currently sitting at 196GB free of 476GB.
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sometimes drives just die...
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The average life of a drive is around 4-5 years, depending on how much data you've written to the drive. And based on your CrystalDiskInfo stats ... you should really replace that drive ... it's on the way out.
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Typical 512GB NVMe TBW is between 300 and 650, depending on the specs. You've got close to 125 at 71% health. It took 6 years, 9 months, and 15 days to get there. So far there's been no errors, so at this rate, it'll last another 9 years, 8 months, and 6 days. You've got time.
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This is nonsense and isn't the only metric for determining a drive's health.
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Then pray tell, what is?
I haven't had any NVMe SSD go bad on me, yet. A few SATA SSD's, but never from write wear. I still have one that's at 63%, maybe even lower. Still works fine.
If you don't have enough memory (RAM), your operating system will use swap space to expand it; by default, this is located on your main drive (NVMe), so it uses it in addition to RAM > yes, that's your problem.
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Both firefox and chrome have massive databases that they write to constantly, with cached pages, images, etc. I wouldn't expect it to kill a drive normally, but if it is failing it could accelerate the death.