After upgrading my system with a shiny new SSD, the HD light was blinking like a heart beat every second or so, and that concerned me. SSD’s have a limited lifetime, for writes, so it occurred to me that Windows might be burning up my SSD by continually writing to it.
After checking around a little on the web, I found the SysInternals windows utilities on the Microsoft techweb site. At first I tried DiskMon, which showed disk activity, but didn’t show which files were being accessed. Then I found Process Monitor, which showed which files were being written and by how much. Process Monitor
The program is not installed. Just unzip it and run it as administrator.
After it runs for a few seconds to a couple of minutes, you can check out the File Summary to see which files are being accessed. I found that there was a lot of activity on the data disk, which seemed odd. But the SSD had very little activity. The primary offender is Firefox actually. The cookie database and the cache were written frequently during my testing.
You can easily export the views from the File Summary to CSV files and analyze them in your favorite spreadsheet to your hearts content.
I may not leave Firefox running all the time on my system when I’m not using it.
Your Mileage May Vary. But at least you’ll know what is going on with your SSD.
– Windy
Windy Weather 