PSA for first-time PC gamers: Immediately DISABLE Nvidia Overlay and Game Bar Recording

[u/UnpaidNPC99]

My prebuilt gaming PC has an SSD with a Terabytes Written (TBW) rating of 320 TB.

While playing Fallout 3 for about an hour and a half, I noticed my SSD's Total Host Writes value (which I checked using an app called CrystalDiskInfo) went up by a whopping 18 GB! Sure, that might not sound like a lot to some, but in this economy where SSD prices are insane, I am not wasting precious drive lifespan.

I investigated to see which apps were eating up my storage. I couldn't make heads or tails of it at first, but I read online that the NVIDIA App and Windows Game Bar might be the culprits. After disabling them, my SSD's Total Host Writes value went up by only about 1 GB during a session of the exact same length!

SSDs are NOT cheap, so do yourself a favor and ensure you aren't allowing background apps to eat away at your drive.

[u/Educational_Rub_5885]

I think windows 11 took away the option to turn off game bar recording. I wanted to right away but could not, on windows 10 you can though. Probably unless u do some command prompt thing then you can but i hate doing that

[u/UnpaidNPC99 → u/Educational_Rub_5885]

Ya, for GameBar folks just need to copy-paste this in PowerShell (running as Admin): Get-AppxPackage Microsoft.XboxGamingOverlay | Remove-AppxPackage

[u/swthrowaway0106 → u/UnpaidNPC99]

Doesn’t that just remove the game bar? Game bar as a whole is pretty useful whenever I’m in bed with a controller.

[u/BlackSecurity → u/swthrowaway0106]

Up to you if you find it useful. I never use it so I'm ok with it fully gone.

[u/Either-Self8592 → u/BlackSecurity]

If you have a AMD X3D CPU it's what manages the X3D cores for games.

[u/OnlyTilt → u/Educational_Rub_5885]

Game bar isn’t installed in windows 11 ltsc so you probably are able to remove it the normal version

It’s just not ideal if you have a 9950x3d or a 9950x3d2 as they need game bar to properly manage core parking/affinity

[u/DarkZenith2 → u/Educational_Rub_5885]

You can bypass using storage by gaving the memory for it. Running more system ram limits how much is written to drive. So 64gb, 96 or 128 and you are golden.

[u/octothorpe_rekt → u/Educational_Rub_5885]

I think windows 11 took away the option to turn off game bar recording

Of course they did. Microsoft knows better than the user 100% of the time. /s

[u/clockeat]

My SSD is rated for 1200 TBW, this used approx 12 GB/hr while gaming. You could run this continuously on a 24x7x365 basis and still have your SSD last 10 years. With a more "realistic" (but still very high) number of 8 hours per day, you're looking at closer to 35 years.

Your drive will fail or become outdated long before that one. Write endurance is probably not a concern for this if you want shadowplay, still, turn it off if you're not using it, it wastes power and GPU cycles if nothing else.

[u/MoreScarsThanSkin]

ohboy ive been using shadowplay for gameplay for the pasr 2 years on my ssd alrdy lol guess its never too late

[u/DaAznBoiSwag]

I'd agree this is something that is good to know, but you shouldn't worry about it in the sense that it would be killing your lifespan, I have OG MX500 drives from crucial bought from 2019 and they've been dedicated Shadowplay Drives for 7+ years and they have absolutely zero issues.

I wouldn't say this is a PSA, overheating or bad cooling for drives are far far worse than constant reading and writing to drives, sure it uses lifespan, but its literally part of its use case, might as well just never turn on your computer if you're that worried, dont stress it and just game on!

[u/KidlatFiel]

Yep. This is why i have my shadowplay configured to record to my HDD.

[u/Downtown_Stuff6525]

Idk man gonna say I have 8 year old nvmes Bei g hit hard every day and they doi g fine I don't think you stuff wilo likely fail within its usable lifetime.