Installing Opera on an SSD, a good idea?

Well hello there!

So, I've some concerns about installing opera on my new SSD (Crucial M4 64GB, if anyone is wondering). SSD's have a limited amount of writes, everyone knows this. Although this isn't really that big of an issue now than it used to be back in the days, you can't ignore the fact that it is still a thing every SSD owner is worried about.

So, what firefox users do is: they install firefox on the ssd, and move the disk cache either to ram or somewhere else on a hard disk (if they have any other storage device besides an SSD)

There are some things about opera that you can adjust; like these options:
opera:config#UserPrefs|CacheDirectory4
opera:config#UserPrefs|CacheStyleFile
opera:config#UserPrefs|OperatorCacheDirectory4

Of course you also have the options in the preferences dialog where you can choose to have no disk cache.

Well, my concern is: how many things does opera write (write/overwrite/remove/...) besides the cache, and is it possible to relocate everything it needs to write to another drive? There aren't as many 'really advanced' options as I would like.

Thoughts on the matter?

if you are really concerned and after maximum speed you can allocate the caches to a ramdisk.
This means that you only have session caches though.

Originally posted by DuncanWilliams:

if you are really concerned and after maximum speed you can allocate the caches to a ramdisk.
This means that you only have session caches though.

I'll be having two storage devices. The SSD for stuff like windows, linux, ... and possibly some applications. Then there is the hard disk, for storage and hopefully writing caches to.

Kind of uncertain that opera actually takes not of the "i do not want your stuff on my ssd, so move it"- gesture.

Personally I would install opera on the sata drive for a number of reasons.
The only speed factor would be in the starting up of opera. So that would not have a lot of affect.

Originally posted by DuncanWilliams:

Personally I would install opera on the sata drive for a number of reasons.
The only speed factor would be in the starting up of opera. So that would not have a lot of affect.

That's true. Opera is fast at starting up either way.

opera was very frustrating on my regular hard drive. the start ups were slow. especially with 10-15 tabs. the best invest i ever made was getting the crucial c300's at the beginning of year. 2x64gb in raid=my computer screams. i was thinking of getting the m4's but i'll pass and wait for the new models for my next build.

Originally posted by DuncanWilliams:

Personally I would install opera on the sata drive for a number of reasons.The only speed factor would be in the starting up of opera. So that would not have a lot of affect.

Wherever you install Opera, the profile directories are going to default to the SSD if that's your system drive.

I know some say that with "wear-leveling" SSD's are supposed to last 10 years, but if my most-used app does a TON of writes to the disk, I don't think it's a great idea keeping the part that does those writes on SSD. And Opera does do a ton of writing in the cache (vps less so).

At first, I thought using a junction would do, and it does, fooling Opera into thinking that the profiles are still on C when in fact they're not. That's probably easier than changing the paths in the OP, particularly since it takes care of the entire profile.

Then I started thinking of a RAM disk for cache, and I still might try that.

Right now, I'm seeing how disabling disk cache altogether goes, while at the same time taking the memory cache off automatic, which is necessary to solve the History Navigation Mode (=3) issue that you'll see eventually regardless of whether you're using disk cache. I set this high enough:

opera:config#Cache|Document

So far, overall memory use for Opera isn't any different than when I was using disk cache, which is confusing (Opera seems to want to range up to 1GB or so no matter the settings or machine), but then I find all these settings somewhat confusing.

Originally posted by rseiler:

Originally posted by DuncanWilliams:

Personally I would install opera on the sata drive for a number of reasons.The only speed factor would be in the starting up of opera. So that would not have a lot of affect.

Wherever you install Opera, the profile directories are going to default to the SSD if that's your system drive.

I know some say that with "wear-leveling" SSD's are supposed to last 10 years, but if my most-used app does a TON of writes to the disk, I don't think it's a great idea keeping the part that does those writes on SSD. And Opera does do a ton of writing in the cache (vps less so).

At first, I thought using a junction would do, and it does, fooling Opera into thinking that the profiles are still on C when in fact they're not. That's probably easier than changing the paths in the OP, particularly since it takes care of the entire profile.

Then I started thinking of a RAM disk for cache, and I still might try that.

Right now, I'm seeing how disabling disk cache altogether goes, while at the same time taking the memory cache off automatic, which is necessary to solve the History Navigation Mode (=3) issue that you'll see eventually regardless of whether you're using disk cache. I set this high enough:

opera:config#Cache|Document

So far, overall memory use for Opera isn't any different than when I was using disk cache, which is confusing (Opera seems to want to range up to 1GB or so no matter the settings or machine), but then I find all these settings somewhat confusing.

I believe if you install Opera as USB stand alone, all profiles, caches, etc will be stored in the Opera directory. This is the solution I have come up with for dealing with a similar problem with DeepFreeze and window's profiles. Gets rid of the need for junctions.

My two cents.
1. You can install Opera on an SSD and disable disk cache. However by disabling disk cache you will encounter some inconveniences. Visited links will be lost as soon as you exit Opera and history navigation will become cumbersome.
"Disk Cache" Off doesn't work as one would suspect or at least as it works with other browsers.
According to Lucav from Opera software:

Opera RAM cache is heavily undersized, in my opinion. There are several reasons for this, but I'm not sure that they are good.
I think the real problem is that Opera is not supposed to be used with the disk cache disabled by prefs. I can try to see if I can improve the situation, but I don't promise.

I would anyway suggest to keep the disk cache on. source

In order to mitigate the issue you could install Opera on an SSD with disk cache enabled but moving Opera's cache to a RAM drive.

2. You can install Opera as USB stand alone with disk cache enabled on a SATA drive.

Ah, I missed that thread somehow.

Now, the funny thing is though, with disk cache disabled I'm not yet seeing the history navigation issues that you're seeing, though historically that feature is very site-sensitive. It's behaving the same way as before.

Note that I'm using HNM=3, and as importantly, have manually adjusted the couple settings I linked to before (this is where it came from--note that the ECMA one no longer exists). Do you set those too to keep below 80% (450000 for Documents is enough to keep ahead of the game here)? This is necessary even when you have disk cache enabled.

I know in the other thread, Opera said that good things are coming for the cache. I hope part of that is this very, very obscure and completely unintuitive 80% "rule."

Originally posted by rseiler:

Note that I'm using HNM=3, and as importantly, have manually adjusted the couple settings I linked to before (this is where it came from--note that the ECMA one no longer exists). Do you set those too to keep below 80% (450000 for Documents is enough to keep ahead of the game here)? This is necessary even when you have disk cache enabled.

The values d.i.z. mentioned are irrelevant for the performance of the RAM cache. They are only related to Memory Cache in connection with HNM3 with disk cache enabled. Memory Cache and RAM Cache are different pair of shoes. With disk cache enabled history navigation works for me as it does with other browsers as well. The issue with history navigation arises only with disk cache disabled which is my default setting.

OK, I was thinking that those settings might no longer apply, but I kept them in place. If they no longer pertain, that's another advantage of disabling disk cache. I wonder what's causing me not to see a difference in history navigation between using disk cache and not?

Perhaps we're talking about different issues, or at the very least you're using some image-heavy sites that I'm not. I'm talking about the issue on general sites with the back-forward cache where when you hit the back button to return to a just-visited page, or then once there try to go forward again, there's network activity as seen by the progress bar jumping (or using a tool to watch for such activity). When set just right (HNM=3 and keeping the 80% rule in mind), necessarily when disk cache is enabled but apparently not with it disabled, Opera for the most part doesn't experience this problem.

BTW, your mention of other browsers not having a problem in this area suggests we really are talking about two different things: all other browsers that I've tried have network activity when doing back-forward testing, at least the majority of the time. They have no setting like HNM=3 to improve the situation. That's probably the main reason I don't use one of them as my main browser.

So, I've some concerns about installing opera on my new SSD (Crucial M4 64GB, if anyone is wondering). SSD's have a limited amount of writes, everyone knows this. Although this isn't really that big of an issue now than it used to be back in the days, you can't ignore the fact that it is still a thing every SSD owner is worried about.

I honestly wouldn't even worry about the issue. From what I understand, even under unrealistically harsh circumstances, an SSD won't hit its write limit for something like 10 years. I'd bet that you'll decide to throw away that SSD before you ever hit the write limit.