SSD friendly file downloading

[mrx23dot]

• I'm reporting a feature request
• I've verified that I'm running youtube-dl version 2020.01.01
• I've searched the bugtracker for similar feature requests including closed ones

Description

Downloading a simple video file eg: youtube-dl -f "hls-480p" xvideos_site_56MB_vid_mp4
Creates many temp files on HDD during download:

x.mp4.part-Frag55.part
x.mp4.part-Frag56.part files of 0-1KB
x.mp4.ytdl
x.mp4.part

SSDs have limited lifespans when writing to them, so please add a feature to use more RAM instead of temporary HDD/SSD writes. Eg. --memory 128MB, would wait for 128MB incoming data then write to the final file, without unnecessary additional writes.

Imagine an SSD in a download server, or SD in RaspberryPi, or even in HDD it causes fragmentation.
See Transmission's file cache handling as an example.

[dstftw]

Download files to RAM disk.

[reallyuniquename]

@dstftw

Download files to RAM disk.

That requires a lot of RAM since some files are huge, I'm talking about dozens of gigabytes per file.

Wouldn't it be possible to download current fragment to memory and then write it to file instead of abusing hardware with unnecessary writes? Or at least add an option to specify directory where youtube-dl downloads fragments to.

[reallyuniquename]

I've been revisiting this issue, it turns out ffmpeg doesn't trash my drive with thousands of files so one can use --hls-prefer-ffmpeg although I'm not sure about the amount of writes. Maybe buffer size for ffmpeg could be tweaked as well.