4 ms·
This is interesting, I didn't know Chrome did this. But it doesn't back up the claim that "[i]f you have media or backup drives [Chrome] just constantly adds we
by clucas 3y ago
This is interesting, I didn't know Chrome did this. But it doesn't back up the claim that "[i]f you have media or backup drives [Chrome] just constantly adds wear to them." Does anyone have anything on that?
- ensignavenger 3y agoAs pointed out above, Chrome no longer does this... but adding wear is a natural consequence of any hard drive scanning process. SSDs are rated for a certain number of read/write cycles, and every time a block is read, it adds wear. Even spinning rust wears out eventually. Not knowing any details about how often Chrome did this, it is hard to say just how significant this wear would be compared to other normal uses of the media. But it is clear that wear would occur to some degree.
- dylan604 3y agoNot only does it add wear, it slows down other processes. People notice this after OS updates where the system re-indexes the volume after the update completes. It's also why most indexing processes do it late night or while the system is idle. For an app like a browser to do it is just rude.
- CorrectHorseBat 3y ago> SSDs are rated for a certain number of read/write cycles, and every time a block is read, it adds wear. Only write cycles cause wear, read cycles don't cause any meaningful wear.
- ensignavenger 3y agoThank you for clarifying that! I should have known that. So perhaps it wouldn't cause any meaningful drive wear, if the system didn't do a lot of writes. Still consumes CPU and power, though.
- cma 3y agoYeah, I mentioned media/backup drives since those are usually HDD rather than SSD. I didn't realize Chrome had stopped doing it now though. To disable it was a crazy number of steps with admin permissions.
- clucas 3y agoRight, I understand about wear, but my point is that the behavior described in the links doesn't indicate that Chrome was scanning backup or media drives - only things like the registry, files directly related to Chrome, etc. If I have a drive with a bunch of random files on it, Chrome wasn't scanning those, was it?