Pirate survival game Windrose was accidentally killing your SSD
Windrose, a pirate survival game that entered early access last month, has been discovered to have a significant technical issue that causes excessive strain on SSDs. Players reported unusually high input/output (I/O) workloads during gameplay, with performance monitoring revealing concerning write patterns to disk.
According to reports from TechSpot and YouTuber Pixel Operative, the issue manifests particularly when players’ characters roam around their bases. The game was found to be reading and writing substantial amounts of data to disk simultaneously, with I/O spikes reaching up to 30MB/s during normal base exploration. More alarmingly, Pixel Operative’s testing showed the game could write up to 108GB per hour to an SSD—rates that far exceed typical gaming workloads and could significantly accelerate SSD degradation and wear.
This discovery raised immediate concerns among players, as such excessive write operations could substantially reduce the lifespan of solid-state drives, potentially causing hardware failures or loss of storage capacity over extended play sessions. The issue highlights an important technical problem in the game’s early access build that developers would need to address to prevent long-term hardware damage to players’ systems.