If you saw one of my recent videos
on the M1 Mac swap memory issue,
that's potentially killing SSDs.
You'd know, I discovered one of the main culprits.
That of course is disk write caching
on third-party browsers,
such as Firefox, Chrome and Edge.
In some situations,
these browser caches were writing
several hundred gigabytes of data,
every single hour to my internal SSD.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to turn off
the browser disk cache function
in these third-party browsers
and discuss what effect it might have on your usage.
Spoiler alert, it's not that big.
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
such as YouTube videos or Twitch streams.
When I say a lot, I mean hours every day.
For normal usage, you probably don't need to bother
with these steps.
For streaming video content or YouTube,
in the example I mentioned in my last video,
these caching processes actually write and buffer the video
to your internal SSD, instead of RAM,
to ensure playback is smooth in case of RAM,
Internet or system issues.
It's a completely normal function of many browsers,
and even happens on Windows PCs as well.
Unlike many Windows PCs
however, the SSD on your Mac
is soldered onto the logic board
and cannot be replaced if it fails.
This is especially important for people who have
a base model 256 Gigabyte SSD due to the lower capacity
and therefore having a lower TBW.
It is more likely to wear quicker
from excessive data writing
compared to a 512 Gigabyte or one Terabyte SSD, for example.
Although like I've said previously,
this will take a very long time to happen,
regardless of how much data you write to your 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.
Before we go get into the rest of the video,
a quick word from Filmora,
if you're looking for a really streamlined editing software,
that's easy to use for both beginners and professionals,
Filmora is a great choice.
I started testing it out a few days ago,
and I was very happy with my experience.
It's available on Mac OS
and is also optimized for the new M1 Macs
running on Apple Silicon.
Edit all kinds of footage,
add a variety of really cool effects, transitions,
and color correction,
and upload your video directly to YouTube
when you've finished.
Filmora is free to use,
but if you do want to upgrade to unlock additional features,
it won't break the bank
like some of the other editing programs out there.
Check out the link in the description
to try Filmora out for free.
Now, first things first,
let me actually show you how to check
how much data, files and services
are writing to your internal SSD.
So the first thing you to do is come into Activity Monitor,
and then you want to come into the Memory Tab,
and then you want to right click on this bar here,
and you want to select the Bytes Written function.
And this is actually going to display right here.
This is going to show how much bytes in total have been written
by this service or app to your internal SSD.
You can see right here,
I've got Safari open doing some work in it,
and this is how much Safari is written into about 12 hours.
There are a few more Safari services down here,
but it's really not that much.
As I mentioned in my last video,
Safari does not write much at all to the cache.
It doesn't write any kind of videos or anything like that.
So right out of the box, it's much better than
these third party browsers.
But, as I'm about to show you,
you can also enable this feature
on the other browsers as well.
So, what does a browser look like
when it's actually writing cached video files
to your internal SSD?
Well, let's open up Google Chrome
and let's go to a 4K video here and we'll skip the ad,
and we'll set it to 4K and we will play this.
And then what we're going to do
is going to go back to Activity Monitor,
and you're going to be able to see here in a second,
something called a Google Chrome Browser Helper.
So, we've got Google Chrome there.
What I'm going to actually do is just search for it.
So 'Chrome,' you can see here, Google Chrome Helper.
And you can see here, the bytes written value
is actually rising fairly fast.
So, it's about 10 to 15 megabytes per second here.
And it might not look like much now,
but if you're doing this for 4, 5, 6, 7 hours a day,
it can be hundreds and hundreds of Gigabytes
written to your internal SSD every single day
as you would have seen in my previous videos.
So what we're going to do is we're going to pause this video
and shut it down.
And what we can do now,
is we're actually going to start
disabling the caches on these browsers.
We're going to start with Chrome, Brave and Opera,
and the reason why I mentioned
all of those browsers together,
is because they're all extremely similar.
They're almost identical
because they are all based on Chromium.
The only difference between these Chromium-based browsers
is the developers have just taken them
in slightly different ways,
but at their core, they are essentially the exact same,
which is good for us because the same command
is actually going to allow us to switch off
the streaming media caching setting.
So coming back into Chrome,
we're actually just going to copy and paste this instruction
into the browser bar.
And we're going to hit the return key on the keyboard.
Now this is going to work the exact same
for all of these Chromium-based browsers.
And what you want to do is you want to come here
to turn off caching of streaming media to disk.
You want to turn this to 'enabled.'
So you want to actually turn that off
and we're going to relaunch,
and what we're going to do now
is you can obviously see that it's enabled.
So this means that we are not caching
streaming media to disk.
We're going to come back to YouTube.
We're going to go to that same 4K video
and we're going to make sure it's playing in 4K, yes, it is.
By the way, the reason I'm playing it in 4K
is just so we can see a bigger difference than 1080p.
And I'm going to come back to the activity monitor,
and you'll notice here that the Google Chrome Helper
is actually going to reload
because obviously we've relaunched.
And you can see here instead of rising by 15-20 Mbps,
that is actually not changing at all.
Because as you already know,
we've simply switched off the browser's ability
to cache and write these particular videos onto your disc.
So that is Google Chrome, but what about Brave and Opera?
Well, I'll show you Brave.
It is again, the exact same step.
You just want to copy and paste this particular command
in the search bar up at the top.
You want to change this to 'enabled,'
and then you simply want to relaunch the browser
and it's going to change that setting for you.
So very, very simple.
One thing I will mention though,
is just make sure you come back here and check it
every once in a while,
because sometimes if you update the app
or you change some settings,
sometimes Google Chrome or Brave
or whatever is actually going to turn this back to default.
So just make sure you check it every now and then,
or even better.
Maybe every couple of days, or every couple of weeks,
if you are worried about excessive data
being written to your SSD,
come back to the Memory Tab
and just have a look at how much bytes have been written
by any apps that you're using,
just to keep an eye on it, if you're worried.
Moving on to Firefox, this one is slightly more complicated,
but still not a huge issue.
What you want to do is you want to search
in the address bar,
"about:config."
You want to press the return key.
You want to accept the risk and continue,
and you want to come up here
and you want to search for, "browser.cache.disk."
And you want to come here to the browser cache disk enable,
and you want to actually switch this
so that it says, "false."
Now, one thing you can also do here,
is you can come up here to the browser cache disc capacity,
and you can actually edit this to a really low value,
say like 500 or even 50.
And then it's just going to greatly
limit the amount that Firefox will cache videos to your SSD.
I don't personally use this, you can, if you want,
I personally just set it to false.
And there's also another setting here
that's popular with other people.
If we just come back up the top
and we delete the word disc
and we just set it to browser.cache,
and then we type in, ".memory."
You can see here,
there's a setting called, "browser cache memory enable,"
and we can switch that to off.
That just means that Firefox won't be able
to cache this information in your RAM.
So, it might actually be good if you're doing
a lot of stuff in Firefox, but you also want to multitask.
You can come here and you can switch this to, 'false,'
and that's going to greatly limit the amount of RAM
that Firefox, but this is at the expense of,
sometimes websites will load slower,
or you might have to refresh the page more often.
So, what I would personally do is just leave this to true,
or perhaps even change it to false and use the browser
as you normally would.
And if you do notice any issues,
you can just come back here and switch it back to true.
Moving on to Edge,
unfortunately with Edge there isn't really a function
within Edge where you can actually change
the browser disc cache writing setting.
So what you need to do is come down into Finder.
You want to go to the top left-hand corner,
click this go button,
on your keyboard, you want to hold down the option key.
And you can see when I hold down the option key,
the hidden library appears.
So you want to continue holding down the option key,
click on library, you want to come into caches.
You're going to come all the way down the bottom,
and you want to go into Microsoft Edge.
You want to go into default,
and then on this cache folder here,
you want to select it, you want to right click on it,
you're going to click get info,
and then you want to come down the bottom here
and you want to change the privilege to read only.
And then you just want to quit that,
close it all down, and then when you open up Edge
and start watching videos, it's no longer going to write
all of those videos onto your internal SSD.
Now, one thing I will mention with Edge in particular,
is sometimes you might actually come into the cache's folder
and empty and delete all of these caches out.
If you've seen one of my videos
on how to actually speed up a really slow Mac,
if you're having issues,
or if you use CleanMyMac from time to time,
that will actually delete all of the folders inside caches.
And if that's the case, what you're going to have to do,
is you're going to have to come back into Microsoft Edge,
go back into default
and then just make sure this cache folder,
click it, get info and make sure the privileges
is set to read only.
So, let's quickly talk about drawbacks.
So, for me personally,
I really haven't seen many drawbacks at all.
You might see a little bit of a performance loss,
for example, perhaps a slightly longer buffer time
when you're watching videos,
or if you leave a particular video.
Say for example, if you pause it
and you come back an hour later,
or you put your Mac to sleep and wake it back up,
if you've been watching a video,
or if you're halfway through a video
and it's already buffered a little bit,
you might have to refresh it.
Because again, that information
has not been written to the browser.
It either has been written to the RAM,
which is temporary memory,
or it hasn't been written at all.
But again, that really isn't a huge deal,
especially if your internet speeds are fairly good.
The other thing is you may see a very slight increase
in RAM utilization.
So, the particular YouTube video or the Twitch stream
that you're watching may eat
a little bit more of your RAM.
But again, in my testing and in my use,
I haven't really noticed this having a huge issue.
I did test this briefly in my previous video.
So I really don't think it's going to be a big deal.
And again, I just want to reiterate,
turning off the browser disk caching settings
in these third party browsers is not essential.
It's only if you're really, really worried
about writing tons of unnecessary data to your internal SSD.
And it's only if you have a very small SSD capacity,
such as a 256 Gigabyte SSD,
and you watch tons and tons of YouTube videos.
Anyway, guys, hopefully you enjoyed this video.
Any comments or questions,
please leave a comment down below.
But apart from that, I will catch you in the next one.