Yes, I agree that it would be useful to turn off Usage/Graphs in total. At times, I don’t use one or more of the tabs.
It would also be useful to limit the usage stats for the any of the time periods (5 mins, 3 hours, 24 hours, etc) so that older data is automatically pruned. Although that would not make as much difference to disk writes it would save some disk space.
Input and Output | Microsoft Learn - Here is an article that helps explain input/output operations in Windows. Below is some info from our dev team to help explain:
I/O operations are not just reading and writing to files (HDD usage). I/O operations also include network and driver communication and even printer communications etc…
Yes, we understand that it’s not only file reads/writes, but did your dev team tried to monitor Glasswire process using Process Monitor? As I already wrote in my earlier post, it matches number shown in Process Explorer IO column, which means those are mostly file writes. It’s not some conspiracy theory, it’s clear as day that it writes lots of data to disk.
I suggest another way to test this, connect some spare drive to your pc, partition it, format it, create “GlassWire” folder, create symlink “C:\ProgramData\GlassWire” pointing to that folder, download HDTune Pro (30 day trial is fine), run it, change to “Disk Monitor” tab and Start it. Remember to not use that drive for storage. I don’t know if it uses the same API/counters as Process Explorer.
Thank you for your report. If you don’t believe we are telling the truth then there probably isn’t much we can do to convince you, but you can do three things yourself to solve this problem even if you feel we’re lying about how GlassWire works:
Switch to “Incognito mode” at the top left GlassWire menu to disable logging so it won’t write hosts to your hard drive.
Use “Incognito mode” when using GlassWire with Bittorrent. Bittorrent accesses many hosts simultaneously and makes GlassWire log IP addresses in over time, causing an unusual amount of logging/writing.
Also you should consider that Bittorrent writes to your hard drive, so if you don’t want to write anything to your SSD you should stop using Bittorrent.
Move the GlassWire database to another drive as mentioned above.
Meanwhile with GlassWire 2.0 we are adding a setting for people who don’t want to write anything to their hard drive. This setting will not log hosts like “Incognito mode” but it will keep other minimal bandwidth data for your history. This new feature/mode is being created just for users like yourself, so please note we are treating your feedback very seriously.
I will forward your message to our dev team so they can respond after the Holidays. For your test to work Process Explorer would need to correctly log IO data.