We disaccustom Google Chrome to kill the hard drive SSD resource

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Somehow, about a year ago, I got a computer that I could take with me to the sofa – a laptop, that is. The laptop was chosen purely for work, one of the requirements for choosing was good performance. The Intel Core i3 processor seemed sufficient in terms of performance.

But, at first, a smart laptop more and more began to annoy me with its slowness. It’s not that he was stupid, hung up and the like – no, he just worked slowly evenly. This was especially noticeable if you work on a “full-sized” computer with a fast hard drive, and then you switch to a laptop. This was due to the laptop’s slow hard drive. Moreover, this is not a problem specifically for my laptop, this is a problem for all laptops, because they have slow hard drives with a rotation speed of 5400 rpm.

One day it got me, and it was decided to buy an SSD. And the fastest was selected. After analyzing the occupied space on the C: drive and finances, it was decided to take a 64 GB SSD. And considering that with a small volume for most solid-state drives, the speed drops proportionally with a decrease in capacity, the range of selectable models quickly narrowed. The choice fell on the Samsung 830.

But how to insert an SSD into a laptop that does not have space for a second hard drive? I immediately dismissed the option of completely replacing the HDD with an SSD. A quick “google” led to the fact that there are still ways – instead of the now unnecessary DVD, put an SSD. I was not the first with such questions, and quickly found that I needed some kind of adapter into which the hard drive lays down and is inserted instead of the drive. I found the correct adapter on ebay.com. The lot was called “Universal 9.5mm 2.5″ SATA 2nd HDD Hard Driver Caddy For CD DVD Optical Bay”. It cost a little over eight dollars.

After almost a month of waiting, a freshly purchased SSD was inserted into the adapter, and the adapter was already in the laptop. Of course, the adapter cover is not quite like that of the native drive, it turned out not quite imperceptibly, but tolerably enough.
Newfangled Windows 8 was installed on a brand new hard drive, everything flew and I was just fabulously glad that my laptop had almost gained a second life. My joy knew no bounds until I started monitoring the remaining life of the SSD. In particular, the SSD Ready program predicted the rest of my SSD’s life in six months. Somehow it was not at all happy. I started reading and wondering why.

It turned out that everything was simple – the main load on the hard drive was … Google Chrome! I would never have thought that the monster of a huge corporation would harm my hard drive so much.
Chrome constantly writes something to the cache. Almost continuously. Here every 2 seconds

c:\Users\User\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache\
There is also a folder where the cache of the online video you are watching is written. This folder is called Media Cache
And icons, history and all that are written. In the end, I came to the conclusion that the User Data folder is just constantly changing, writing-reading files and killing my SSD.

A quick analysis of the Internet made it clear that this does not cause any inconvenience to Chrome engineers, because Chrome has practically no settings for this part. The settings can be forcefully applied by adding a parameter to the shortcut, and then Chrome must be launched through this shortcut, otherwise it will start without parameters. The same dances with a tambourine and firelis. But with Opera, everything is simpler – I set it in the settings without a cache, and that’s it.

It was decided to disable that damned Chrome cache so that it wouldn’t write anything to disk at all. Add the “–disk-cache-size=1 –media-cache-size=1” parameter to the Google Chrome launch shortcut. And about a miracle! The cache is not written, and the browser … does not fly and works rather poorly. It is especially noticeable when you open chrome with 30 open tabs, when it reloads everything. Well, we didn’t get rid of the records at all either – something like icons and history was still written to disk.

The second solution to the problem was to transfer the folder with the User Data chrome profile settings to the HDD. This of course would solve all the problems, but the question is why did I buy an SSD?

The next option, in my humble opinion, solved all my problems. I decided to use a RAM Drive – i.e. keep everything in RAM, and only write to the hard drive when you turn it off. Considering that my laptop is either on or in standby mode, it will be very rare to write when it is turned off. Of the programs I liked, I chose Qsoft RAMDisk. Installed as a driver. In the properties, I chose the size of the disk, the file system, where to write when shutting down. I allocated 512 MB for the disk (I think a reasonable minimum of 128 MB).

It was possible to transfer just the cache folder, it was possible to add the Media Cache folder to it, but I decided to completely get rid of all sorts of entries and transfer the entire User Data folder.

It was again possible to specify –user-data-dir=”path to the ramdisk” in the shortcut parameters to redirect the storage of the profile, it could be written in the registry, but if it was started without a shortcut or updated, all this would not work. I began to think how to do it so that nothing changes to redirect. And then I remembered symbolic links!

The Link Shell Extension utility was downloaded, with the help of which I actually created a “shortcut” in place of the User Data folder, a link that led to my ramdisk. Those. there was nothing on the disk, going into the User Data folder we were immediately redirected to the ramdisk. Moreover, what is the advantage of such a solution – neither the system nor Chrome saw any catch.

Chrome began to work even faster than it was on the SSD. Very fast. Now I’ll probably even recommend everyone to at least move the chrome cache to a small ramdisk. For me personally, it is a mystery why engineers do not pay attention to the problem that chrome writes a lot and often. Reliability of information is good, but not at the cost of killing a hard drive!