So my new SSD has had several hundred gigabytes of data written to it in the last month since I installed it and I have determined that it is being caused by Brave and it’s caching of video streaming data like YouTube. I can see hidden .tmp files being written into the C:\Users\USER\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Default folder by the Brave browser when watching YouTube thanks to Windows’ resource monitor.
There used to be an option within the flags section of brave called “#turn-off-streaming-media-caching” which supposedly prevent this from occurring, but it was removed at some point.
I’m not convinced by the argument that SSDs can write so much data in their lifetime and it would take such and such number of years to reach said limit, those numbers are theoretical and determined in controlled testing environments. I don’t want Brave performing needless write operations on my SSD all of the time so can this option be returned to the browser?
If not, can this video streaming data be sent to the C:\Users\USER\AppData\Local\BraveSoftware\Brave-Browser\User Data\Default\Cache folder (where it should be to begin with) instead? At least then I can redirect that folder to a RAMdisk for temporary caching without touching my SSD.