Consensys, the company behind MetaMask, has announced that it will release a fix for the MetaMask Browser extension “immediately” after users highlighted an issue where it may be writing excessive data—hundreds of gigabytes daily—on solid-state drives (SSDs), potentially shortening their lifespan.
A spokesperson from Consensys informed Cointelegraph that there’s typically high disk activity affecting some MetaMask users.
A notable report came from a user named Ripper31337. They noted in a GitHub bug report from June 24th that following the installation of MetaMask extensions in Chromium-based browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Opera, the system was continuously writing data to SSDs in the background, even without any user engagement.
SSDs generally last about 5-10 years under standard use, but they can degrade much faster with heavy usage.
According to Ripper31337, the disk was experiencing abnormal writing at a staggering rate of 5 megabytes per second, which adds up to about 500 gigabytes each day and 25 terabytes over three months.
Consensys is working on a solution
In a statement to Cointelegraph, the spokesperson from Consensys shared that the team is actively looking into the problem, stating that a fix will be released soon. They added, “Browser extension wallets usually write state to disk, which is expected behavior, but we’ve seen unusual reports from a limited number of users regarding high disk activity.”
This issue, they noted, primarily impacts users with large data states. The team is exploring ways to reduce the data size and the frequency of writes when the data isn’t in active use.
Lingering concerns
Ripper31337 initially flagged the issue on June 24th, but another user, “Quanquan,” mentioned a similar concern in a review dated May 9th. They described how MetaMask, even when not in active use, wrote 100 gigabytes of data to their SSD in just one day. Disabling the MetaMask plugin significantly reduced this data usage.
It appears that the complaints didn’t receive much attention, but some users still found them helpful.
Ongoing bug issues
A different user reported on GitHub on July 17th that the bug was still present, saying, “The worst part is that many users aren’t even aware this is happening. My browser with the extension running 24/7 has effectively halved my SSD’s lifespan.”
On July 19th, members of the MetaMask team engaged in a thread, reiterating their commitment to resolving the bug.
