Chrome is silently killing your SSD

So I am the proud owner of new SSD drive to replace an old spinner in my laptop. Because I cloned my old windows install that used to be on a spinner, I have been keeping an eye on things and making sure windows is treating it as an SSD properly so I don’t end up with a dead drive sooner than I have to.

Right away I noticed some concerning I/O activity so I went and did things like kill the indexing service, etc hoping to see it come to an end. Nope, still seeing tons of writes.

I researched  further and used Sysinternals ProcessExplorer to discover that it is Chrome that is going to town with write operations.

Googling about that lead to some settings to turn off. The malicious website checking and prefetching settings were the problem according to Google. So I turned those off. I’m all set now right? Wrong! I left one process running for 6 hours, and it did 2 million writes for 2.5 GB of data.

Anyway, to end the story short, I now close all chrome instances before walking away from my laptop.