Reducing Wear on My System Drive

Updated 14 December 2025

A solid-state drive will last as long as a hard disk drive if it isn't abused with hibernation. I'm more concerned about getting rid of cached data, which can build up over time. It just happens to reduce wear at the same time. Installing zram will also reduce wear.

All of these things reduce write actions to the physical drive. Write actions produce heat. My system drive gets warm, but it never gets hot.

Move the /tmp Directory to tmpfs

Clear the /tmp directory before you move it to tmpfs. At the terminal:

sudo cp -v /usr/share/systemd/tmp.mount /etc/systemd/system/

sudo systemctl enable tmp.mount

Link the /home/username/.cache Directory to tmpfs

Clear the /home/username/.cache (your username instead of "username") directory before you move it to tmpfs. At the terminal:

mkdir -p ~/.local/share/user-tmpfiles.d

echo "D /run/user/1000/cache 0700 richard richard 1w
L+ /home/richard/.cache - - - - /run/user/1000/cache" > ~/.local/share/user-tmpfiles.d/cachetmp.conf

systemctl --user enable systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer

systemctl --user start systemd-tmpfiles-setup.service systemd-tmpfiles-clean.timer

Firefox

This is how you tame Firefox:

Put about:config in the address bar and hit enter.

Find browser.sessionstore.interval and add four zeros to 15000.

Find browser.cache.disk.enable and change it from false to true (if false).

Find browser.cache.memory.capacity and change it to 524288 (512 MB).