2022 MBPro 14" Memory Swapping SSD Degradation - Issue or Not?

[ET iPhone Home]

Hey Guys,

I just purchased a New 2022 MBPro 14" Base Model, the one that sells for $1999. I've had it for 1 week and have yet to open the box. I stumbled upon a few Youtube videos today about "Memory Swapping SSD Degradation" that the lifespan of my new MBP could last me 2-5 yrs. Is this true? Should I be concerned? I'm thinking about just returning this laptop and holding out for the M2 and hope this issue gets resolved then. I'm hearing it could be the M1 or the OS on these new MBP's that's causing the SSD degradation.

Thanks for any feedback.

 

[Sanpete]

I stumbled upon a few Youtube videos today about "Memory Swapping SSD Degradation" that the lifespan of my new MBP could last me 2-5 yrs. Is this true? Should I be concerned?

No and no.

 

[kentzh]

Their videos are for reference only, don't be overly trusting. The computer is just a productivity tool, maybe you have let it earn you a few computers in five years, and the macbook pro has reserved an ssd slot, and you can also replace the SSD to increase the capacity later, I don't think you need to worry at all, I don't think so. Don't think vloggers know better than apple engineers.

 

[throAU]

Mine barely ever uses any swap, so no....

 

[yitwail]

the macbook pro has reserved an ssd slot, and you can also replace the SSD to increase the capacity later

Maybe on some older MacBook pro, but definitely not in a 14/16 in M1 Pro/Max MacBook pro. However, it's extremely unlikely the SSD would fail, and even if it did, it should be covered if you get Applecare+

 

[ET iPhone Home]

Maybe on some older MacBook pro, but definitely not in a 14/16 in M1 Pro/Max MacBook pro. However, it's extremely unlikely the SSD would fail, and even if it did, it should be covered if you get Applecare+

Thanks for the reply. I did got back to the Youtube videos I previously watched and did not pay attention to when those videos were released. I did see 10 months to 1 year old. With that said, it was the earlier M1 on these MBP that was causing SSD Degradation due to Memory Swapping is now my understanding. Do you know if Apple addressed this issue with a software update? Because it's still the same M1 on my 2022 MBP 14" as it was for the 2021 MBP 13", correct? Thank you. I still have 1 week to decide if I'm keeping this MBP and perhaps wait for the M2. I see there's an Apple Keynote set for March 8, 2022.

 

[jdb8167]

Thanks for the reply. I did got back to the Youtube videos I previously watched and did not pay attention to when those videos were released. I did see 10 months to 1 year old. With that said, it was the earlier M1 on these MBP that was causing SSD Degradation due to Memory Swapping is now my understanding. Do you know if Apple addressed this issue with a software update? Because it's still the same M1 on my 2022 MBP 14" and it was for the 2021 MBP 13". Thank you. I still have 1 week to decide if I'm keeping this MBP and perhaps wait for the M2. I see there's an Apple Keynote set for March 8, 2022.

Minimum SoC on the 14” MBP is the M1 Pro so no, it’s not the same as the 13”M1 MBP. Also, the minimum RAM on the 14” MBP is 16 GB when most of the people having high swap writes to their SSD are on Macs with only 8 GB.

The number of reported problems has gone down significantly over time with MacOS updates though there are still a few trickling in. But I haven’t seen any with the new 14” and 16” MacBook Pros. Just use your new MacBook and be happy.

 

[Realityck]

Thanks for the reply. I did got back to the Youtube videos I previously watched and did not pay attention to when those videos were released. I did see 10 months to 1 year old. With that said, it was the earlier M1 on these MBP that was causing SSD Degradation due to Memory Swapping is now my understanding. Do you know if Apple addressed this issue with a software update? Because it's still the same M1 on my 2022 MBP 14" and it was for the 2021 MBP 13". Thank you. I still have 1 week to decide if I'm keeping this MBP and perhaps wait for the M2. I see there's an Apple Keynote set for March 8, 2022.

HI, just to note you have a 2021 MBP, not 2022.

Report: macOS 11.4 update fixes M1 Mac SSD wear reporting issue

A data reporting error made it seems like M1 Macs were performing too many writes on the SSD.

www.macworld.com

Also there is absolutely no M2 Mac coming for a March 8 keynote that is associated with a updated $599 iPad Air on feature parity with iPad mini 6 along with a update to the $399 iPhone SE to support 5G.

Future Macs such as 27" iMac successor and possible Mac mini are hoping for incorporating the recent M1 Pro/M1 Max ARM processors. Possible to see this about end of April to June.

Later on there is discussion about Mac Pro incorporating multiple M1 Max processor (up to 4) 2nd half of this year. The M2 is thought of arriving sometime after the next October iPhones as a replacement for just the M1 used in Macs.

 

[ET iPhone Home]

Minimum SoC on the 14” MBP is the M1 Pro so no, it’s not the same as the 13”M1 MBP. Also, the minimum RAM on the 14” MBP is 16 GB when most of the people having high swap writes to their SSD are on Macs with only 8 GB.

The number of reported problems has gone down significantly over time with MacOS updates though there are still a few trickling in. But I haven’t seen any with the new 14” and 16” MacBook Pros. Just use your new MacBook and be happy.

Thanks. I feel more confident in keeping my 14" MBP.

 

[ET iPhone Home]

HI, just to note you have a 2021 MBP, not 2022.

Report: macOS 11.4 update fixes M1 Mac SSD wear reporting issue

A data reporting error made it seems like M1 Macs were performing too many writes on the SSD.

www.macworld.com

Also there is absolutely no M2 Mac coming for a March 8 keynote that is associated with a updated $599 iPad Air on feature parity with iPad mini 6 along with a update to the $399 iPhone SE to support 5G.

Future Macs such as 27" iMac successor and possible Mac mini are hoping for incorporating the recent M1 Pro/M1 Max ARM processors. Possible to see this about end of April to June.

Later on there is discussion about Mac Pro incorporating multiple M1 Max processor (up to 4) 2nd half of this year. The M2 is thought of arriving sometime after the next October iPhones as a replacement for just the M1 used in Macs.

Thanks for the verification of my 2021 14" MBP. I bought it last week so I just took it as a 2022 model. I've decided to keep it. I don't think I want to wait until Oct. 2022 for the M2. Besides, after everyone's response to this thread, I feel more confident. Thanks again.

 

[yitwail]

Thanks for the verification of my 2021 14" MBP. I bought it last week so I just took it as a 2022 model. I've decided to keep it. I don't think I want to wait until Oct. 2022 for the M2. Besides, after everyone's response to this thread, I feel more confident. Thanks again.

You're welcome, and just to clarify things further, M1 is based on A14 chip, M2 on the A15, and the primary difference is M2 will be somewhat more power efficient than M1. Based on A15 performance, M2 would have somewhat better benchmark scores, but the performance difference should be seldom noticeable in normal use.

 

[TinyMito]

Hey Guys,

I just purchased a New 2022 MBPro 14" Base Model, the one that sells for $1999. I've had it for 1 week and have yet to open the box. I stumbled upon a few Youtube videos today about "Memory Swapping SSD Degradation" that the lifespan of my new MBP could last me 2-5 yrs. Is this true? Should I be concerned? I'm thinking about just returning this laptop and holding out for the M2 and hope this issue gets resolved then. I'm hearing it could be the M1 or the OS on these new MBP's that's causing the SSD degradation.

Thanks for any feedback.

Did you just watch Internet Scientist? Please don't...

 

[ET iPhone Home]

Did you just watch Internet Scientist? Please don't...

I happen to watch 4-5 YT videos on the subject. I wasn't paying attention to the channel name.

 

[Chevysales]

Hey Guys,

I just purchased a New 2022 MBPro 14" Base Model, the one that sells for $1999. I've had it for 1 week and have yet to open the box. I stumbled upon a few Youtube videos today about "Memory Swapping SSD Degradation" that the lifespan of my new MBP could last me 2-5 yrs. Is this true? Should I be concerned? I'm thinking about just returning this laptop and holding out for the M2 and hope this issue gets resolved then. I'm hearing it could be the M1 or the OS on these new MBP's that's causing the SSD degradation.

Thanks for any feedback.

absolute craziest thing...
you really believe that?

much ado about nothing just something for bloggers to yap about.
it was months ago and never really an issue anyhow
btw... its a late 2021 mbp

 

[ET iPhone Home]

Minimum SoC on the 14” MBP is the M1 Pro so no, it’s not the same as the 13”M1 MBP. Also, the minimum RAM on the 14” MBP is 16 GB when most of the people having high swap writes to their SSD are on Macs with only 8 GB.

The number of reported problems has gone down significantly over time with MacOS updates though there are still a few trickling in. But I haven’t seen any with the new 14” and 16” MacBook Pros. Just use your new MacBook and be happy.

Would this issue then apply to the base model M1 MBAir w/ 8 GB Ram?

 

[ET iPhone Home]

absolute craziest thing...
you really believe that?

much ado about nothing just something for bloggers to yap about.
btw... its a late 2021 mbp

Yes, I learned mine is a late 2021 14" MBP base model even though it was purchased last week.

 

[TinyMito]

Stop worrying wear and tear on SSD, normal use is impossible to see degrade unless you are running a server on it 24/7.

 

[Reggaenald]

Their videos are for reference only, don't be overly trusting. The computer is just a productivity tool, maybe you have let it earn you a few computers in five years, and the macbook pro has reserved an ssd slot, and you can also replace the SSD to increase the capacity later, I don't think you need to worry at all, I don't think so. Don't think vloggers know better than apple engineers.

Well, first off, I didn’t know you could replace it add an SSD to an M1 MacBook Pro. Second off, Butterfly Keyboard. Apples engineers, regardless their department, have to earn their credibility back, and if it’s just by wiping the people developing the software for their parts. Apple has proven over and over for the past years that they don’t really know what they are doing and even with the best of intentions get a whole lot of stuff wrong, best example:
macOS Monterey

 

[yitwail]

Would this issue then apply to the base model M1 MBAir w/ 8 GB Ram?

Not necessarily, it all depends on how much swapping takes place, and that depends on how many apps you run concurrently and how much memory they use. As long as you're not continually seeing a spinning beach ball, I think it's unlikely the ssd would wear out before the keyboard or the screen.

 

[DaKKs]

I've had two SSDs running as swap drives for nearly 9 years now. They haven't failed yet. In one of my systems, I have a system drive, a Micron SSD, dated 2012 March. It's still healthy.

I think people grossly underestimate the reliability of SSDs. Your system will become unusable for other reasons long before the SSD fails due to nand wear. That being said, my personal opinion is I will never buy a system with non-replaceable SSD purely out of principle. Not because of the fact I think the drive is going to fail, but because if it does, the data is unrecoverable.

 

[jdb8167]

I've had two SSDs running as swap drives for nearly 9 years now. They haven't failed yet. In one of my systems, I have a system drive, a Micron SSD, dated 2012 March. It's still healthy.

I think people grossly underestimate the reliability of SSDs. Your system will become unusable for other reasons long before the SSD fails due to nand wear. That being said, my personal opinion is I will never buy a system with non-replaceable SSD purely out of principle. Not because of the fact I think the drive is going to fail, but because if it does, the data is unrecoverable.

On a modern Mac the data is unrecoverable in any case even if the SSD was removable. Keeping good backups is not optional anyway.

 

[Fishrrman]

I, too, have a 2021 MacBook Pro 14" (base model).
I decided to take action to prevent excessive disk use on the internal SSD.

Please see these posts I put up in the Apple Silicon forum:

ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

Multiple times over the life of this thread, I have offered my suggestions on how to STOP the excessive writes to disk that seem to be prevalent in the m-series Macs. My suggestion was: DISABLE vitural memory swapping to the SSD. No one was ever willing to try this, and at the time I did not...

forums.macrumors.com

and

ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

"This window tells you less about disk writes than you think. The disk window is the one you want to look at to see if this is really working." OK, here are some quick screenshots. I scrolled down about 2/3 of the way in the Activity Monitor "disk" pane. How do these numbers look...?

forums.macrumors.com

and

ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

Isamilis asked: "How do you disable virTula memory swapping to the SSD? Is that through terminal?" Yes. Turn off VM disk swapping: sudo launchctl unload -w /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.dynamic_pager.plist Remove VM swap files: sudo rm /private/var/vm/swapfile* Check that VM is...

forums.macrumors.com

 

[0_1]

Seems like you'll wait 3 years for the M2, order it, see some random **** on youtube and then just leave it in the box since you'll be too freaked out to actually use it.

 

[HardBall]

Hey Guys,

I just purchased a New 2022 MBPro 14" Base Model, the one that sells for $1999. I've had it for 1 week and have yet to open the box. I stumbled upon a few Youtube videos today about "Memory Swapping SSD Degradation" that the lifespan of my new MBP could last me 2-5 yrs. Is this true? Should I be concerned? I'm thinking about just returning this laptop and holding out for the M2 and hope this issue gets resolved then. I'm hearing it could be the M1 or the OS on these new MBP's that's causing the SSD degradation.

Thanks for any feedback.

I have never seen any one having issue with this in real usage scenario.

It seems to be something that only worries people because of some specific corner case trotted out by the benchmark heads, not really something you need to worry about, for almost everyone who actually owns and works on a laptop. Those who are overly beholden to minor benchmark differences are somewhat paranoid about various unlikely or perceived "issues" of these kind. Another case is the purported "overheating" of the 14" M1 Max, which is a complete non-issue in real usage.

 

[MrElvey]

Stop worrying wear and tear on SSD, normal use is impossible to see degrade unless you are running a server on it 24/7.

For most users, yes. But, the system can read and write to swap so fast that if the system is thrashing indefinitely, the SSD can wear out quickly enough to have an unexpectedly short lifetime. I've had multiple non-Apple SSDs and SSHDs (hybrid drives) die on me in previous Macs I installed 'em into.
I've learned to keep an eye on mine and take action when it is thrashing, even though the system still performs OK, in order to maintain longevity. The wear level is given by the “Percentage Used” field. That 16% below would probably be 50 or 75% if I hadn't. While it's thrashing, which it can do indefinitely when I have left too much running (normal use for me - bad habits), it's reading and writing over 500MB a second, sustained, thus the nearly one PETAbyte transferred so far. I meant to sign up for AppleCare right after purchase but missed the deadline cuz I was sick. So far it's doing OK, and this is confirmed by SMART info showing no uncorrectable errors:

sudo smartctl -a /dev/disk0

Password:
smartctl 7.3 2022-02-28 r5338 [Darwin 21.5.0 arm64] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-22, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org


=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Number:                       APPLE SSD AP0512Q
Serial Number:                      xxx
Firmware Version:                   387.120.
PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID:            0x106b
...

NVMe Version:                       <1.2
Number of Namespaces:               3
Local Time is:                      Tue Jun 21 23:46:01 2022 PDT
Firmware Updates (0x02):            1 Slot
...


=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED


SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        54 Celsius
Available Spare:                    100%
Available Spare Threshold:          99%
Percentage Used:                    16%
Data Units Read:                    987,678,100 [505 TB]
Data Units Written:                 934,461,978 [478 TB]
Host Read Commands:                 7,095,295,298
Host Write Commands:                3,111,096,942
Controller Busy Time:               0
Power Cycles:                       407
Power On Hours:                     2,242
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   28
Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
Error Information Log Entries:      0


Read 1 entries from Error Information Log failed: GetLogPage failed: system=0x38, sub=0x0, code=745