Windrose can put excessive strain on storage drives and write more than 100 GB of data per hour

The pirate-themed RPG survival game Windrose, developed by the Uzbek studio Kraken Express, has been reported to put unusually heavy strain on storage drives—sometimes writing over 100 GB of data per hour.

According to a report by Tom’s Hardware, multiple gamers and experts noticed that the game, currently in early access, causes abnormally high disk activity. In some cases, it reads and writes data at speeds of 15–30 MB/s, depending on what the player is doing and where their character is located in the game. The load only drops in certain areas or when the player remains idle.

A tech enthusiast known as Pixel Operative compared disk usage across several games over 60–90 seconds. In Valheim, the system read about 1 GB and wrote just 5 MB of data. In Enshrouded, it read 7 GB and wrote 695 MB. However, Windrose showed dramatically higher usage, reading 32 GB and writing 1.3 GB in the same timeframe.

Experts estimate that under heavy gameplay conditions, Windrose could write more than 100 GB of data in just one hour. This level of activity could potentially damage drives using QLC memory or older SSDs. The issue is believed to be caused by an inefficient save system within the game.

Fortunately, the developers have already addressed the problem. In patch version 0.10.0.4.268, they introduced optimizations to reduce disk нагрузка (load). Tests by Pixel Operative confirm that after the update, write speeds during gameplay dropped significantly to around 10–16 MB/s. Players are strongly advised to update the game as soon as possible.