prevent firefox from buffering youtube videos into my HDD

[juan pablo salazar aldana]

hello everyoone. so i have a old noisy 1TB seagate HDD and it has always been kinda loud, however it sudendly got louder and its always making sound while i watch youtube videos, wich is 50% of what i do in this pc, i´ve tried changing firefox conf, to load the cache to either ram or a USB drive, with no success, any modification i do seems to have no effect whatsoever, so i want to either make firefox use more of my ram wich is always low on usage, or find a way to make it load the page file to the ram or USB drive. thanks in advance

 

[10tacle]

First, I would back up all data on your HDD immediately. Unusual noise from an HDD is not normal and an indicator of a failure that will happen. It's only a matter of time. Regarding changing up how Firefox works, try this link's instructions if you have not already: http://lifehacker.com/5687850/speed-up-firefox-by-moving-your-cache-to-ram-no-ram-disk-required

That link is several years old for an older version of FF, but it still may help since the core Firefox engine has not changed over the years. One Firefox developer said there were some negatives to that fix however:

1) This will slow down some plug-ins (Adober reader, for certain) which rely on being able to get to the data as a file; if we can't store it on disk in our cache, we'll have to stream it to a the file instead.

2) The size of the memory cache is capped at a much lower number than the size of the disk cache; it's a lot easier to fill it up and start evicting things.

3) The disk cache, unlike the memory cache, persists across restarts. This means that you trade off slower startup (due to none of your restored tabs being in cache) and slower initial visits to all sites for slightly faster repeat visits to sites, as long as you didn't visit too much stuff in between.

4) We have ongoing work for Fx4 to make use of the memory cache as well as the disc cache for the same content (right now we use one or the other but not both for any given resource). Once we do that, you'll get all the benefits of this "tweak" without the drawbacks... and using the tweak at that point will be a strict loss.

 

[atljsf]

try to run cristaldisk info on it, to determine if the increment of noise is realted to the hard disk near to dying

then you could try to disable the buffer you mention

usually is simpler to get another hard disk and replace the noisier one, toshiba lately has been working well for me in both noise levels and reliability

 

[juan pablo salazar aldana]

thanks for the answers, i tried the link you gave me, just before posting this and didnt work, im sitting in 8gb of ram and hardly using 2gb when ff is open, i also tried moving the cache to a usb stick, but although a file called cache blank was created, it still uses the pagefile to a great extent, currently have 9gb of a page file.

 

[juan pablo salazar aldana]

cristaldisk says that the HDD is in good state, temp is fine as well, nothing bad at all, also have to remark that the HDD does not make any noise at all until firefox is open, when i play videogames to any extent its mostly quiet.
youtube seems to be the problem here, as my hard drive just gets mad as soon as it starts streaming video in HD of FHD, i´ve also considered buying a SDD because it gets really noisy unless my room fan is on or music is playing in a considerable volume, but id like to avoid buying it if i can becase they dont come cheap in my country.

 

[veldrane2]

hello everyoone. so i have a old noisy 1TB seagate HDD and it has always been kinda loud, however it sudendly got louder and its always making sound while i watch youtube videos, wich is 50% of what i do in this pc, i´ve tried changing firefox conf, to load the cache to either ram or a USB drive, with no success, any modification i do seems to have no effect whatsoever, so i want to either make firefox use more of my ram wich is always low on usage, or find a way to make it load the page file to the ram or USB drive. thanks in advance

I use chrome for youtube and misc vids. In it, when you use incognito mode it basically does everythign in memory and not HDDs (or at least as much as it can). Firefox should have a similar privacy mode (but I forgot what its called there), where it basically avoids HDDs altogether and doesn't store any info. Look for it.

 

[atljsf]

ṕrivate window

if that doesn't help, perhaps a new hard disk is required, a toshiba or western digital should be quieter, mine are, my seagate on the laptop makes me feel unconfortable, sounds like it is going to break or explode

in my laptop i will replace it definitively

 

[g-unit1111]

First, I would back up all data on your HDD immediately. Unusual noise from an HDD is not normal and an indicator of a failure that will happen. It's only a matter of time. Regarding changing up how Firefox works, try this link's instructions if you have not already: http://lifehacker.com/5687850/speed-up-firefox-by-moving-your-cache-to-ram-no-ram-disk-required

I don't know - if the disk is fine, to me that would signal a network problem if the videos keep buffering. I'd be willing to bet it's more likely a slow router / connection than a slow hard disk.

 

[juan pablo salazar aldana]

hello everyoone. so i have a old noisy 1TB seagate HDD and it has always been kinda loud, however it sudendly got louder and its always making sound while i watch youtube videos, wich is 50% of what i do in this pc, i´ve tried changing firefox conf, to load the cache to either ram or a USB drive, with no success, any modification i do seems to have no effect whatsoever, so i want to either make firefox use more of my ram wich is always low on usage, or find a way to make it load the page file to the ram or USB drive. thanks in advance

I use chrome for youtube and misc vids. In it, when you use incognito mode it basically does everythign in memory and not HDDs (or at least as much as it can). Firefox should have a similar privacy mode (but I forgot what its called there), where it basically avoids HDDs altogether and doesn't store any info. Look for it.

i tried it on FF with no success unfortunely, however i will try chrome to see if it fixes it, whatever i can to get rid of all that noise, about my internet its a 10mb internet, wich is about the best i can get in my country, whiout the price jumping to a 100 dollars equivalent.

 

[juan pablo salazar aldana]

so i checked SDD prices and they are definitely not a choise, i can hardly afford a 128gb one, also tried chrome on incognito mode, whit no positive result.
i have to add, my HDD is mostly quiet whenever im not watching youtube, only a couple of games can trigger the anoying and loud noises, and only do for short ammounts of time.
also i can watch a couple videos before it starts making noise, i doubt temp is an issue as this noise happens all year round, now that i think about it, it has always been there, i just started anoying me recently because my AC makes no noise therefore the sound is more present.
also its not a clicking sound, as i´ve seen many videos with hard drive noises, and havent found any that makes a noise like mine.
i also tried, completly dissabling and reducing the page file size, but that just made youtube use a .tmp file instead of the paging file.
i will try turning off indexing as i´ve read that could also be making the noise, also heard that reducing the HDD transfer speed can help, has a?nyone tried that before? could it work