A low-key paranoia developed in the Windrose community in the weeks after launch when players discovered that the game was writing a lot to their hard drives. Like, a concerning amount of data. So much data that you might start to fear for your SSD's life. Luckily, the devs have addressed those concerns directly with a patch.
The issues with drive usage have apparently been there since Windrose's April 14 launch, and they were the subject of sporadic posts on the game's Steam forums. It wasn't until some tests from content creator Pixel Operative that the problem really started to gain traction, however.
Pixel Operative's tests found that normal activity in Windrose could cause serious data write spikes, to the tune of as much as 30 megabytes per second when you're sailing the seas. A series of tests posted to Twitter found that, over the course of 60-90 seconds of normal gameplay, Windrose might write as much as 1.3GB to your drive. Similar survival games, like Enshrouded and Valheim, write a mere fraction of that data.
That doesn't mean, of course, that Windrose will stuff your SSD with unnecessary data – just that, for whatever reason, it's constantly rewriting your save files. That kind of constant access could, potentially, affect the life of your disk, but it's a bit like eating a potato chip. One won't hurt you, but several thousand over the course of years is going to have a negative effect on your long-term health.
Either way, the Windrose devs are looking out for your PC's health, issuing an April 30 patch that ensures "disk usage during gameplay has been reduced." They ain't kidding, either – the spikes on that open sea test are down to about 15 megabytes per second, according to Pixel Operative, and even that is far less sustained than it was in the previous version. The write issues have improved across the board.
Debate in the community raged for weeks over how bad the issue really was, but it was at least enough of a problem to catch the devs' collective attention, and it seems things have substantially improved. Enjoy the extra longevity for your SSD, and go on, have another chip or two while you're at it. You and your hard drive both only live once.
Windrose proves that survival games don't have to be difficult to be popular.
