How To SAVE Your Mac's SSD! (M1 Swap Memory Issue/Browser Disk Caching)

You may be aware of some Mac users reporting excessive data being written to their internal SSD. In a previous video, I determined that although swap memory can cause this, the browser disk write cache can also write a huge amount if you watch a lot of Youtube videos or similar streamed content. In this video I show you how to disable this feature on several popular third-party browsers, including Chrome, Brave, Opera, Firefox, and Edge. I am using the current M1 Mac versions of these browsers.

Paste into Chrome (also works on Brave/Opera): chrome://flags/#turn-off-streaming-media-caching-always

IF YOU HAVE ISSUES PASTING THE ABOVE, DELETE THE #, COPY AND PASTE INTO YOUR BROWSER SEARCH BAR, AND THEN RE-ADD THE # BEFORE turn-off

🔥EXCLUSIVE YOUTUBE VIEWER DEALS:

⌨️ MAC ACCESSORIES I USE:

⚡ SOCIAL MEDIA + OTHER LINKS:

00:00 What Is Disk Write Caching?
02:49 Check How Much Data Browsers Are Writing To SSD
04:40 Disable on Chrome
06:34 Disable on Brave and Opera
07:30 Disable on Firefox
09:15 Disable on Edge
10:49 Will Disabling Disk Write Cache Cause Issues?

#AppleM1 #swapgate #SSD
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[brentvercauter]

Createdlabs: It is only really an issue if you watch a lot of youtube videos every day.
Me: Uses laptop almost only for watching videos. *Begins to sweat heavily.*

[mrwonder]

Yo apple should pay you if they don’t already. You have given me way more useful information about this laptop than apple ever has, by far. Good looks man.

[straightbusta]

This is my new favourite channel, no unwanted BS, no 10 minhte stretched out content etc. Instant sub

[shashankkumar]

I don't have a Mac but still l love watching your videos

[parjau]

Thank you! Very timely for me. Being aware of this issue (although it appears the write capacity is way higher than people assume - e.g. if you take the SMART tools readouts people have famously posted to report excessive write usage in 2 months, 15.7TB used 1% and 150TB used 3%, which equate to 1570TB & 5000TB respectively), I personally noticed 400GB had been written in the course of a morning of just surfing around - turned out in the background was a single website with a couple of streaming videos playing continuously.

[VinsysVlogs]

None of settings are effective in Firefox and in chrome. I guess they have updated the flag settings. Is there any way around to disable disk writing in 2022?

[mrgrumpy]

I'd also recommend using a Tab Suspender add on on top of disabling the caches. However, that might not be the best option for people with very slow internet connections. No point keeping 10s of tabs in memory which will eventually go to disk swap, if you're not using them.

[Jr-yivk]

I found the 11.3 Beta 5/6 have resolved my issues on excessive TBW.

Safari seems to be better at SWAP memory management compared to 11.2.3.
I prefer Safari because it has the best Reader Mode in my opinion and iCloud Keychain.

[DJomant]

Remember that Chrome has one more Flag:
Turn off caching of streaming media to disk while on battery power.

Make sure to turn this one off as well.

PS: Thank you for letting people know. Great content.

[marvin]

Thank you very much. But what about other programs and especially the "kernel task"? This one is still heavily writing to my SSD though.

[ItsNITREX]

Oh wow, thanks for a better approach to limit caching in browsers! This is much better than the plugin methods I mentioned in my latest video. Thank you for doing quality research on those!

[Smart.Potato]

This got me thinking, how much does iphone do swap memory usage since it has less ram as compared to android. Would be great if you can do a review on it.

[steve_one]

I cannot see your recommendation in settings, seems chrome now don't offer this option or they've made it incredibly hard to find in the latest version of chrome 😞

[andreinebolei]

Many thanks. Because of your video, I fixed the issue with monthly terabytes write to my ssd. I also found that a process named "bird" was writing 30 terabytes to my ssd from the date of purchase - 5 months. This process is associated with ICloude Drive and I had to abandon uploading the document folder to the cloud, but this is more a plus than a minus.

[RobertFollis]

I only use Safari and My M1 MBP 8/256 has used 21% of SSD life in 5 months writing 258TB to disk. This means the SSD will die at just under 2 years which is unacceptable. Apple are going to have huge warranty problems.

[aldoalf]

"It's only a issue if you see hours of vídeos everyday" ups 🙊🙈😅😞

[dcpowered]

This longer works in Google Chrome. The caching option is not available anymore. I wonder if Chrome is now optimized by default?

[GrandpaDoesMovies]

There is no option to turn off cache. Upon further research, it would appear that this option is no longer available.

[MrDKPhil]

noticed that flags are gone from Chrome v94, what to do ?

[Tmg-]

We don’t have to worry if we are using Safari right ? And what about Netflix and Prime video ? Do they dotn count ?