Users of the MetaMask extension for Chrome, Edge, and Opera might want to uninstall the software until a bug that's eating away at SSDs is fixed.
MetaMask is the self-proclaimed "everything wallet" that allows users to "buy, sell, swap, send, [and] receive" various cryptocurrencies; "collect [and] trade NFTs"; and "connect to thousands of crypto dapps" (distributed applications) from a single interface.
Cointelegraph reported on July 20 that Consensys, the company that owns MetaMask, has confirmed the existence of a bug in the platform's extension for Chromium-based web browsers that "has been writing hundreds of gigabytes of data per day into [users'] solid-state drives" since at least May.
An issue filed by "ripper31337" on GitHub claimed that MetaMask wrote "25 Terabytes in 3 months" and that the problem manifested even when logged out of the extension. MetaMask developer Mark "Gudahtt" Stacey acknowledged the problem on July 18.
"It writes 5 MB/s nonstop in the background, even if you're logged out," said a user on X who reported the GitHub finding. Worst case scenario, 420GB a day (421.88 GB to be precise), could add up to 38TB of data over three months of continuous use. However, the attached CrystalDiskInfo data (which no doubt accounts for some time powered off) shows a total host write of 26517 GB on one affected SSD, not as bad as it could have been, but still an eye-watering amount, and a colossal amount of needless SSD wear.
A spokesperson for Consensys reportedly told Cointelegraph that "while browser extension wallets do regularly write state to disk, which is expected behavior, we’ve taken note of a recent observation shared by a small number of MetaMask users who reported unusually high disk activity” and that "the issue predominantly impacts users with unusually large state" so it's "exploring strategies for reducing state size” to further address the problem.
SSDs have become increasingly resilient over the years—cloud backup company Backblaze said in 2022 that the SSDs in its data centers had actually become more reliable than the HDDs—but needlessly writing terabytes worth of data over the course of a few months still isn't wise.
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