Advice Request At What TBW Percentage Do You Start Taking Action to Reduce Writes to the SSD as Much as Possible?

Please provide comments and solutions that are helpful to the author of this topic.
Monthly? I can see it daily by checking System Informer.

capture_10052025_170436.jpg

But bluntly speaking, unless you plan to use your PC for decades, you do not have to worry about it.

I take preemptive measures the day I buy the hardware. My headphones are 15 years old, I take a good care of them. My old PC lasted 10 years, I donated it.
My 6 years old 512GB has 88% and my 1 year old 2TB has 100%. I disable Search, prefetch, indexation, I have moved browser caches and downloads to RAMdisk.
 
Last edited:
You probably don't need to worry about until you are close to the SSD's given TBW value.
As we have discussed in a different thread before, this is how it is for me at the moment.
1759678190619.png

Similar to @TairikuOkami my browser cache is on RAMdisk while all sort of downloaded files is saved on the HDD. I also use quite a lot of Portable Apps. All of them are on the HDD. My VMs are on the HDD, Three Android Emulator softwares are also on the HDD. I torture my poor HDD. Anything vital is saved on the cloud on places like Google Drive, One Drive, Google Photos (unlimited full size photo backup by using Google Photos Revanced).
Another one is, avoiding AV products that write a lot of data on signature updates.
 
Monthly? I can see it daily by checking System Informer.

View attachment 291587

But bluntly speaking, unless you plan to use your PC for decades, you do not have to worry about it.

I take preemptive measures the day I buy the hardware. My headphones are 15 years old, I take a good care of them. My old PC lasted 10 years, I donated it.
My 6 years old 512GB has 88% and my 1 year old 2TB has 100%. I disable Search, prefetch, indexation, I have moved browser caches and downloads to RAMdisk.
I am at 88% already after 3 years only. How to move browser caches and downloads to ramdisk?
My pagefile size is 16 MB, but I keep browser cache on SSD; most probably I will die before my SSD do.
Does having small pagefile makes a lot of difference?
 
Last edited:
How to move browser caches and downloads to ramdisk?
You can use symlinks, but Edge has stopped supporting it, but it is possible to move cache location in browser settings.
Code:
reg add "HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Edge" /v "UserDataDir" /t REG_SZ /d "Z:\Edge\User Data" /f
I backup browser profiles, so I just copy them from onedrive after install, it also saves some settings and flags.
Code:
rd "Z:\Brave" /s /q
taskkill /im brave.exe /f
takeown /s %computername% /u %username% /f "%LocalAppData%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data" /r /d y
xcopy "D:\OneDrive\Soft\Brave" "Z:\Brave" /s /i /y
rd "%LocalAppData%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data" /s /q
mklink /d "%LocalAppData%\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data" "Z:\Brave"

rd "Z:\Edge" /s /q
taskkill /im msedge.exe /f
takeown /s %computername% /u %username% /f "%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Edge" /r /d y
xcopy "D:\OneDrive\Soft\Edge" "Z:\Edge" /s /i /y
rd "%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Edge" /s /q
mklink /d "%LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Edge" "Z:\Edge"

rd "Z:\librewolf" /s /q
taskkill /im librewolf.exe /f
takeown /s %computername% /u %username% /f "%AppData%\Librewolf" /r /d y
xcopy "D:\OneDrive\Soft\Librewolf" "Z:\Librewolf" /s /i /y
rd "%AppData%\Librewolf" /s /q
mklink /d "%AppData%\Librewolf" "Z:\Librewolf"
 
Does having small pagefile makes a lot of difference?
I have not used pagefile since Vista, so I can not compare. Pagefile is security and privacy risk, you can remove it at shutdown or you can encrypt it, but disabling it works as well, as long as you have plenty of RAM. My DeusEx game used to crash, because I had only 16GB RAM and the game required like 14GB and it was not enough for the game and OS.
 
You can use symlinks, but Edge has stopped supporting it, but it is possible to move cache location in browser settings.
reg add "HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Edge" /v "UserDataDir" /t REG_SZ /d "Z:\Edge\User Data" /fI backup browser profiles, so I just copy them from onedrive after install, it also saves some settings and flags.
I use symlinks and backup my cache folder by a bat file using robocopy. One runs at shutdown to backup and one run and startup to restore the backup but as you know symlinks are not working well with Edge. If I have 100 MB of cache restored in the ram disk then when I open Edge after the system starts those 100 MB becomes like 7 MB most of the time so Edge is not reusing that cache, it's deleting them and creating new ones. So backing up the cache is not very helpful at the moment.
Your policy seems to be for the whole UserData folder. Is there any method for only the cache?
 
After updating Windows 11 24H2, I noticed that my system creates two restore points 10 minutes apart every Tuesday, each at least 1.x GB in size. Is this normal, or should I disable System Restore to eliminate the excess writes?
I disable volume shadow copy service after W install; I find restore point useless.
 
I've never used a SSD enough for it to come close to its estimated TBW value. I replace them well before that happens, simply due to upgrading to a faster SSD (SATA to M.2, M.2 to NVMe), or a larger capacity one. But if I had a SSD nearing the end of its estimated life, I would just replace it, rather than worrying about reducing writes. SSDs are fairly inexpensive these days, particularly as I mostly buy used ones anyway.

My first SSD suddenly died without reaching a high TBW value. It was a cheap Chinese one and since then I've only used ones from established brands.