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Luckily, this feature can be switched off relatively easily. Turning off streaming media caching in ChromeĬhrome uses a process called “Google Chrome helper” to write and cache video files to your SSD. This will display how many bytes that particular app or process has written to your SSD in total since it’s been open.
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How to view bytes written value inside activity monitor. This is simply to do on macOS, just open Activity Monitor, go to the “Memory” tab, and right click on the top menu. How to check how much data apps and processes are writing to your SSDįirstly, we need to know how to check how much data apps such as Chrome or Firefox are writing to the internal SSD. If you want to limit how much data these browsers write to your internal SSD, I’m going to show you how to disable them on several different browsers. This is especially important for people who have a base model 256GB SSD.ĭue to the lower capacity and therefore having a lower TBW, it is more likely to wear quicker from excessive data writing compared to a 512GB or 1TB SSD for example. Although, like I’ve said previously, this will take a very long time to happen regardless of how much you write to it. Unlike many Windows PCs however, the SSD on your Mac (depending on the model) is soldered to the logic board and cannot be replaced if it fails. It’s a normal function of many browsers and even happens on Windows PCs as well. This is done instead of RAM to ensure playback is smooth in case of RAM, internet, or system issues.
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For normal usage, you probably don’t need to bother with these steps.įor streaming video content, or Youtube in the example I mentioned in my last article, these caching processes actually write and buffer the video to your internal SSD. When I say a lot, I mean hours every day. It’s important to note that excessive browser disk caching is only really an issue if you’re watching or streaming a LOT of video content.
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Safari and Firefox with caches disabled write very little data.
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