OpenAI Codex Sparks SSD Chaos
Contemporary SSDs have a restricted number of write cycles before they fail. Presently, OpenAI is working to rectify a problematic logging feature that has been decreasing the lifespan of Codex users’ solid state drives (SSDs) through excessive data writes, significantly diminishing the devices’ value.
Excessive Writes: A Costly Concern
A bug report submitted last week for the Codex coding agent highlights the ramifications in its title: “Codex SQLite feedback logs can write ~640 TB/year and quickly deplete SSD endurance #28224.” “On my machine, after approximately 21 days of uptime, the primary SSD has recorded about 37 TB,” noted developer Rui Fan, a project management committee member of Apache Flink. “Process/file-level analyses indicate Codex SQLite logs are the primary continuous writer.”
“That extrapolates to about 640 TB/year. On a 1 TB SSD, that equates to roughly 640 full-drive writes annually. Some consumer SSDs are rated around 600 TBW, resulting in potentially exhausting a full drive’s warranted write endurance in under a year.”
SSDs: Longevity and Cost
SSDs possess a finite lifespan, often quantified in terabytes written (TBW). This figure differs by model and capacity. Samsung’s 2025 9100 PRO SSDs, for instance, promise 600 TBW for the 1 TB SSD. Beyond that threshold, performance tends to decline, and failure likelihood increases. The issue with Codex lies in its excessive logging data written to SSD storage, raising user concerns about shortening their hardware’s lifespan.
A Significant Blow to Finances
Another developer contributing to Rui Fan’s thread observed, “Codex assessed the disk usage and indicated this bug cost me $38.64 in drive value of my Samsung 990 2 TB NVMe.” This developer subsequently referred to the Codex-generated estimate of the bug’s overall expense: “This regression plausibly resulted in low-single-digit millions of dollars in SSD endurance losses across users during the March-June window.”
Codex’s Reaction and Resolution
Codex’s economic impact analysis presumes a cost of $0.13 per TB written to SSDs. This is grounded in the formula: TB written × (SSD price / SSD TBW). Given a 1 TB SSD, we estimate Rui Fan incurred a cost of $12.33 for 37 TB of wasted storage. (Cost per TBW = SSD price / SSD endurance = $200 / 600 TBW = $0.333 per TB written.) A larger and pricier SSD with a superior TBW rating would incur less cost per wasted byte (e.g. $0.25 per TB for a $300 / 1200 TBW 2 TB Samsung 9100 PRO SSD).
In December 2025, Codex developers announced intentions to incorporate telemetry by default (except where legally prohibited) into the Codex CLI. However, this issue pertains to local diagnostic logging, which was introduced when the app launched last year and is also enabled by default. The logs remain on the device unless included by the user in a feedback report.
Efforts to Remedy the Impact
Concerns regarding excessive write operations with OpenAI’s Codex have been surfacing in the project’s GitHub repository for several months. A representative for OpenAI confirmed that engineers are aware of the situation and are actively working to resolve it – as evidenced by several recent pull requests aimed at addressing the issue. It is stated that these logs are designed to assist OpenAI engineers in diagnosing problems and that the issue arose from high-volume data stored in a manner that resulted in significantly more disk activity than anticipated.
The Core of the Issue
While purported solutions have been implemented and the company has made some headway, users continue to report issues. The problem appears to stem from work performed in February to log app-server SQLite at TRACE level, which generates more detailed logs than, for instance, ERROR level. It is noted that Codex, presumably operating on GPT-5.3, reviewed this specific series of commits, making it all the more surprising that the code was poorly conceived.
The SSD Narrative: When Drives Deteriorate Rapidly
It’s not every day you discover your SSDs are rapidly exhausting their lifespan like a Geordie on a night out. Yet, thanks to Codex, that is precisely what is occurring. Keep those drives monitored, or they may become as extinct as a Dinosaur nursing a hangover!
