Using iotop, I am discovering some very interesting reasons why my (very nice, rather expensive) / mount nvme drive is getting worn down by writes to just 71% health in a few years!
As the picture shows, I left my system running overnight with iotop going, and I'm seeing that gnome-software and opera are using up a ton of my writes all the time. I don't have automatic updates enabled, and even if I did, I don't even have 800+gb of data on my / drive. This is truly astronomical levels of writing going on, and I think it largely explains why my other nvme, which is non-root, is still at 94% disk health despite being explicitly used for large batch file jobs by me.
Can anyone help me whip gnome-software, zorin, or opera into shape, to extend the life of my nvme drive? I'm not sure where to start investigating these big, complex programs to find out what part of their configuration is causing these writes.
A correction to what I earlier said: I do have gnome-software automatic updates enabled. I have gone ahead and disabled it... but can it be that this is really responsible for such a large write in a single night? I'm a little shocked, but I can believe it if others can confirm they've also seen this behavior... just something to be aware of I guess...
Using iotop as a starting point is a good idea, but it is not conclusive, either. I would use S.M.A.R.T. to examine and also test the drive using smartctl, for a deeper dive.
With Gnome, I would put Gnome-software higher on the suspect list than the shell, because it has continuous activity that affects NAND, whereas the Shell can have a lot of write activity, but a much smaller NAND footprint.
I will look into caching. There are actually many kinds of caching a modern browser does though, I think - standard resource caching, page sleep probably uses another cache, update caching... I'm just not sure which one of these was going off to such a high degree while the computer sat idle overnight!
good question. Normally I prefer .deb installs for all my software, but it looks like that's not available for ZorinOS 18:
adam@AHPC:/var/log$ flatpak list | grep opera
Opera com.opera.Opera 133.0.5932.60 stable flathub system
adam@AHPC:/var/log$ opera -v
Command 'opera' not found, but can be installed with:
sudo snap install opera
