The Disk I/O Bottleneck
When you stream a video or audio file in Google Chrome (for example, watching a long movie on Netflix or listening to an hour-long mix on Soundcloud), the browser does not just play the data and discard it. By default, Chrome aggressively caches chunks of that streaming media directly to your computer’s hard drive. It does this so that if you decide to rewind the video by 30 seconds, it can instantly load the data from your local disk rather than re-downloading it from the internet.
While this saves bandwidth, it is terrible for your hardware if you use an older SSD or a slow mechanical hard drive. Constantly writing gigabytes of temporary video data to the disk causes immense I/O thrashing, slowing down your entire operating system, and unnecessarily degrading the lifespan of cheaper solid-state drives. If you have a fast, unmetered internet connection and would prefer Chrome to keep streaming data in RAM (or just re-download it if you rewind) rather than grinding your hard drive, you should disable disk caching for media.
How to Turn Off Streaming Media Caching
You can force Chrome to stop writing media chunks to the disk via the experimental flags menu.
- Open Google Chrome.
- Click inside the main address bar at the top of the browser.
- Type
chrome://flagsand press Enter. - A page titled “Experiments” will load.
- In the search bar at the top, type Turn off caching of streaming media to disk.
- The specific flag will appear highlighted in yellow. Next to it is a dropdown menu.
- Change the dropdown menu setting from “Default” to Enabled. (Note: You are “Enabling” the feature that turns the caching off).
- Click the blue Relaunch button at the bottom of the screen.
Upon restarting, Chrome will stop aggressively writing temporary video and audio chunks to your local storage, significantly reducing disk I/O when watching long streams.