Users of the MetaMask extension for Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera) have reported a serious problem. It can record on SSD hundreds of gigabytes of data every day, rapidly using up the drive’s life. MetaMask’s owner, Consensys, has confirmed the existence of a bug that causes excessive drive wear.
MetaMask is positioned as a «wallet for everything» that allows users to «buy, sell, exchange, send [and] receive» various cryptocurrencies; «collect [and] trade NFTs»; «connect to thousands of crypto-DApps» (distributed applications) from a single interface.
One of the GitHub users under the nickname ripper31337 reportedthat in 3 months, MetaMask had written 25 TB of data to its solid-state drive. And the problem persisted even after the extension was deactivated.
In social network X, one of the users saidthat MetaMask can write 5 MB/s in the background without stopping. This results in 420 GB of data being written per day, or almost 38 TB in 3 months of continuous operation. Considering that the system may not be running 24/7, the 25 TB volume seems quite realistic.
🚨Metamask users, pay attention
A user on github discovered a critical bug in Metamask by ConsenSys – after a fresh install on Chromium-based browsers (Chrome, Edge, Opera), it writes 5 MB/s nonstop in the background, even if you’re logged out.
That’s ~500 GB daily – or 25 TB… pic.twitter.com/enFVd0oLGC
— DSG (🔟/🔟) (@dsg_666) July 17, 2025
In response to Cointelegraph’s request, a Consensys spokesperson confirmed the existence of a problem that causes MetaMask «to write hundreds of gigabytes of data per day to [users’] hard drives in Chromium-based browsers. At the same time, he explained that «browser-based crypto wallets regularly write data to disk — this is expected behavior». However, the team took into account user complaints about extremely high write activity.
It turned out that the problem affects users with a very large amount of stored data the most, so the developers are looking for ways to reduce its volume. As it turned out, the problem has existed at least since May, but it has not yet been fixed and is still eating up «» users’ SSDs.
Despite the fact that modern SSDs have become much more durable — in particular, Backblaze reported back in 2022 that SSDs are even more reliable than HDDs in its data centers — regular pointless writing of tens of terabytes of data still significantly reduces the drive’s life.
Source: tomshardware
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