External bootable SSD/HDD as means to save the internal M1 SDD from degradation - effective ?

[yellowhelicopter]

Hi guys.

As a foreword, I must say I'm a total noob in terms of Macs or MacOS. Anyway, I've just got an M1 8/256. It was quite costly for me and I want it to serve me for a really long time. So I'm very much concerned about longetivity of its internal SDD and don't want to constantly worry about how much GBs were written to it every day and limit my wishes because of it (f.e. to not use Chrome or to not watch Youtube too much etc etc). Basically, I want the internal SDD to be used as little as possible and simultaneously to do everything I want with the mini and don't limit myself.

Hence the question, will a using of an external bootable SDD or HDD considerably lessen "Data Units Written" on internal SDD?
I'm not much concerned about speed, after all I used a Core 2 Duo machine with HDD from like 2007 before I got M1, don't point fingers at me, lol. Is it an effective way for the purpose? Or perhaps just redirecting the swap file to external drive (if it's possible at all) will achieve about the same?

 

[MediaGary]

I had created an external bootable SSD for my M1 Max Studio base model using a Sabrent 2TB drive attached to a Thunderbolt port. It worked fine for a couple of weeks, and then wouldn't wake from sleep (blinking amber power light). After a firmware re-load at the Apple store (not sure if they updated it) the problem happened again in a few weeks.

The good news is that if it had worked reliably, there would have been no wear-and-tear on the internal SSD. The neutral news is that I suspect the problem was related to the brand or controller firmware within that specific SSD, and that it's possible that through experimentation, it could be possible to find a reliable brand/model. The bad news is that there's nobody to ask, so you're on your own with figuring out an answer.

My recommendation is to enjoy the bloom of the M1 machine that you have, keeping in mind that eventually, all flowers will wither away.

 

[yellowhelicopter]

It worked fine for a couple of weeks, and then wouldn't wake from sleep (blinking amber power light). After a firmware re-load at the Apple store (not sure if they updated it) the problem happened again in a few weeks.

Hmm, very strange. And there absolutely wasn't any way to restore it other than firmware reload at Apple store?

The good news is that if it had worked reliably, there would have been no wear-and-tear on the internal SSD.

Good to know, it's what I hoped to hear. Also, I read that external bootable drives connect and work much more reliably, basically any brand/type of drive on either USB A or Thunderbold/C port works now on Monterey compared to how it was on early versions of Big Sur, when MMM1/Mac OS was quite picky about that, don't know how true it is.

My recommendation is to enjoy the bloom of the M1 machine that you have, keeping in mind that eventually, all flowers will wither away.

It's a good advise, but unfortunately not for me. As I already know about many cases of excessive internal drive degradation (effectively degradation of the computer itself) I cannot help but often have to worry about how much data were written. I'd like to be as free from such worry as I was with my ancient Windows C2D machine, and hope an external drive will help with that. You scaried me a bit with the story of the non-awakening Mac though.

 

[Dammit Cubs]

I think this question of how, how long are you going to keep this computer and how much total data writes are you expected to see in the system needs to be figured out. Depending how on the system is writing to the NAND, the memory life cycles might far exceed that of your personal needs where this question of degradation might not be seen for many many years.

Based on the current amount of bytes written in your system, you can create a linear projection of use your usage. While I don't think that's necessary accurate - it can give an idea of the total bytes written and then you can compare it to a standard expected amount of a general nand flash device with the same amount of storage.

 

[BanditoB]

Current NAND chips are rated for between 60-150 TB written, which means that if you wrote about 40 GB/day every single day for a year, you'd use about a fifth of the SSDs life span (this is assuming a lifespan of around 70 TB written, so at the low end of the NAND chip write ratings). Typical office workers write 10-20 GB/day, so that would allow for about 10 years of SSD use before failure would be a concern. If you're writing less data, as is typical of a home machine, and you don't use it every day of the year, your SSD lifetime goes up from there. In other words, with normal use, the SSD is going to outlast the usefulness of the computer's other components, such as the CPU, GPU, and port speeds, so worrying about wearing out the SSD is really quite pointless as other components of the system are likely to fail before the SSD does.

If I were you, I would work the other way around. Use the internal SSD with it's superior speeds as you need to use the computer. If, and only if, you wear out the internal SSD, then you could switch to an external SSD to keep the system useable.

But, do what you need to do for you.

 

[AAPLGeek]

Bit pointless. Even if you get the fastest thunderbolt drive it will still bottlenecked due to higher thunderbolt I/O latency. As a result, your machine will always feel less snappy compared to running off of the internal drive.

Keep in mind, the 250GB internal drive is assumed to have TBW rating of at least 150TB. So even if you wrote 20GB every single day, it would still take 20 years to reach that TBW limit.

 

[hans1972]

Current NAND chips are rated for between 60-150 TB written,

But in practise they manage in the 1000 - 9000 Tb range.

 

[jz0309]

Hi guys.

As a foreword, I must say I'm a total noob in terms of Macs or MacOS. Anyway, I've just got an M1 8/256. It was quite costly for me and I want it to serve me for a really long time. So I'm very much concerned about longetivity of its internal SDD and don't want to constantly worry about how much GBs were written to it every day and limit my wishes because of it (f.e. to not use Chrome or to not watch Youtube too much etc etc). Basically, I want the internal SDD to be used as little as possible and simultaneously to do everything I want with the mini and don't limit myself.

Hence the question, will a using of an external bootable SDD or HDD considerably lessen "Data Units Written" on internal SDD?
I'm not much concerned about speed, after all I used a Core 2 Duo machine with HDD from like 2007 before I got M1, don't point fingers at me, lol. Is it an effective way for the purpose? Or perhaps just redirecting the swap file to external drive (if it's possible at all) will achieve about the same?

I think chance of physical damage to your laptop are higher than your SSD "dying".
Get AC+ if you're so concerned and enjoy your computer

 

[yellowhelicopter]

Keep in mind, the 250GB internal drive is assumed to have TBW rating of at least 150TB. So even if you wrote 20GB every single day, it would still take 20 years to reach that TBW limit.

Well, after 10 hrs of browsing and some youtubing yesterday it appears it's not as bad as I feared - about 9GB. Today, after 6 hours of the same it's 5GB. However, an external drive is a must anyway if one is going to download/torrent intensively.

Get AC+ if you're so concerned and enjoy your computer

Unfortunately it's not possible (at least for now) where I'm living (flag in your signature).

 

[AAPLGeek]

Well, after 10 hrs of browsing and some youtubing yesterday it appears it's not as bad as I feared - about 9GB. Today, after 6 hours of the same it's 5GB. However, an external drive is a must anyway if one is going to download/torrent intensively.



Unfortunately it's not possible (at least for now) where I'm living (flag in your signature).

Just get the cheapest USB HDD for torrents in that case. Or a SATA SSD in an external enclosure if you want something more speedy. Anything more for external storage or torrents would be an overkill.

 

[yellowhelicopter]

I also turned off Spotlight and Safari bookmark syncing service, it helped considerably to lessen written data. They were ones of the 5 winners in the written data contest on my system ) Unfortunaly can't turn off other 3, they are core system processes and Rosetta, but those two you can kick out without much grief.

 

[Fishrrman]

The premise of the topic (these days) is faulty.

The internal drive will be faster -- FAR faster -- than ANY external drive you can connect. Most external drives don't come anywhere close. The new Apple internal SSDs literally "leave them back in the dust".

HOWEVER...
There ARE "steps you can take" to minimize wear-and-tear on the internal drive. This is what I do:
- TURN OFF virtual memory disk swapping (using terminal). You DO have to take care not to overload physical RAM by having too many apps open, too many tabs, etc.
- TURN OFF Spotlight so that it's not continually indexing. I've done that with EVERY version of the OS on EVERY Mac I have since Spotlight was first introduced. I don't miss it.
- You should BUY ENOUGH RAM (when buying the Mac) so as to "have enough" physical RAM to do your day-to-day tasks without resorting to VM.

I've been doing the above for years now.
I have NEVER had ANY memory-related crash from doing this. NOT ONE.

 

[theorist9]

I wouldn't worry about it. Here's a screenshot of the DriveDX report from the 1 TB SSD on my 2014 MacBook Pro just before I replaced it as my main computer. With six years of use I had 112 TB writes, which averages 52 GB/day, 7 days/week. And even with that, my wear leveling count is 85%, and DriveDX's algorithm says my SSD Lifetime Left Indicator is 100%

Of course, the write capacity of the SSD in your Air will be different from mine (but I don't know how it will differ—maybe someone else can say).

If you are concerned, you could use it normally, and install a trial version of Drive DX after, say, 1 month, then compare that to what you see after an additional 6 months (which would require a 2nd trial, not sure if they'd let you repeat that). DriveDX says a drive will often do an initial wear leveling drop to 95% during its first week of operation, after which the rate will slow. So you want to get past that first quick drop into a more linear region in order to do the extrapolation.

EDIT:

I just checked my 2019 iMac, which has been running Monterey 12.4 for 59 days, during which it averaged 148 GB writes/day, even without significant swap. So maybe newer OS's behave differently. Details:

https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ssd-swap-high-usage-of-terabytes-written.2284893/page-139?post=31280433#post-31280433

 

[BanditoB]

@theorist9, what's up with all of the Unsafe Shutdowns? Did your system crash a lot or is this not a good metric?

 

[theorist9]

@theorist9, what's up with all of the Unsafe Shutdowns? Did your system crash a lot or is this not a good metric?

IIUC, "Unsafe Shutdown Count" is a metric reported by the SSD's SMART tool, and I don't know what criteria it uses to determine these.

But, yes, my system used to crash frequently. I finally found a fix: Reboot regularly. Back before WFH, I found that everything would run great for about a week, after which things would become unstable. Thus I started rebooting weekly, which greatly reduced the crash frequency. But after WFH started, either because I was using my computer more, or because I was using it in different ways (several hours/day on a VPN, plus using remote desktop), I found things started to get wonky after a few days. Thus I switched to daily reboots.

I've never been able to get an explanation for why I needed regular reboots to avoid crashes, i.e., why things became unstable after too much "on" time. I did read once that the advantage of rebooting is that it returns the computer to a known state, so maybe it's related to that. Another theory is memory corruption.

Finally, I'll note that my early 2000's PPC G5 was rock-solid. I only rebooted that about once/year. But all my subsequent Macs, which were all laptops (2008, 2011, and 2014 MBP's), did exhibit that crashing problem.

 

[Droid13]

I am running a late 2013 MBP with a 500GB SSD. No noticeable problems with SSD degradation here. I do have 16GB RAM though...

 

[yellowhelicopter]

I am running a late 2013 MBP with a 500GB SSD. No noticeable problems with SSD degradation here. I do have 16GB RAM though...

On the other hand, I stumbled on a guy who was selling his m1 mini 8/256 quite cheap just yesterday, and when I asked why it was so cheap it appeared the SSD health was about 65%. Just for a year and half of intensive work. So if one going to use it without mercy a bootable external SSD is not a bad idea at all.

 

[Droid13]

On the other hand, I stumbled on a guy who was selling his m1 mini 8/256 quite cheap just yesterday, and when I asked why it was so cheap it appeared the SSD health was about 65%. Just for a year and half of intensive work. So if one going to use it without mercy a bootable external SSD is not a bad idea at all.

That's the trouble with anecdotes. Everyone has one. What was the intensive work that this person was doing?

 

[yellowhelicopter]

What was the intensive work that this person was doing?

Don't know details, I suspect it was programming, but anyway it's scary that m1's ssd can degrade with such speed.

 

[theorist9]

Don't know details, I suspect it was programming, but anyway it's scary that m1's ssd can degrade with such speed.

You should ask him to create an MR account and post a screenshot of a DriveDX report on that SSD .

Though I suppose the combination of 8 GB RAM (higher swap) and 256 GB SSD (lower wear capacity than larger drives) represents the worst case for SSD wear on AS Macs.

I wonder if AppleCare+ will cover a worn-out SSD.

 

[Green242]

I have been running my Mini M1 with an external Thunderbolt drive for the last year with any major issues. Initially I had the monitor not waking form sleep and needed to restart the monitor. that issue has cleared up with OS updates for me. The only other issue is that the location services need to be reset on occasion. I am using an ACASIS TB /USB4 model TBU401 enclosure (not currently available on Amazon) with an Inland stick.

INLAND Premium 1TB SSD 3D TLC NAND M.2 2280 PCIe NVMe 3.0 x4 Internal Solid State Drive, Read/Write Speed up to 3100MB/s and 2800MB/s, 1600 TBW

INLAND INTERNAL SOLID STATE DRIVE SSD 1TB UP TO 3100MB/s and 2800MB/s, 1600 TBW

www.amazon.com

Also, follow the OP's suggestions on this thread. From using the smartmoxntools I can see that my internal drive has not been used much since I set up the external drive, writes and reads are minimal and probably from when I booted from it.

ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

Please read the update at the end of this post. Hi, I have Mac mini m1 256/16 for almost 8 days. After those 8 days I can see 0.9 TB written. From what I found on the web this ssd should last for ~~150 TBW. After 8 days I have 0.9 TBW :) I checked on my MacBook Pro 13" from 2018, 256/16 as...

forums.macrumors.com

Also, as a test I was able to use the external drive to boot a Studio M1, without issues, that I have since returned as it was way more than I need.

 

[yellowhelicopter]

I am using an ACASIS TB /USB4 model TBU401 enclosure (not currently available on Amazon) with an Inland stick.

That is way out of my money situation range. I'll probably be using Orico M2PV-C3 (USB-C up to 10Gb/s) enclosure.

 

[Mike Boreham]

That is way out of my money situation range. I'll probably be using Orico M2PV-C3 (USB-C up to 10Gb/s) enclosure.

TRIM and SMART are supported on external Thunderbolt drives, so for regular booting there is a incentive to use a Thunderbolt drive, as well as being faster of course.
Neither is essential and many people boot from external USB.

 

[Droid13]

You should ask him to create an MR account and post a screenshot of a DriveDX report on that SSD .

Though I suppose the combination of 8 GB RAM (higher swap) and 256 GB SSD (lower wear capacity than larger drives) represents the worst case for SSD wear on AS Macs.

I wonder if AppleCare+ will cover a worn-out SSD.

I would like to see that too.

Also wondering if that kind of rapid SSD degradation is a MacOS problem thing, an Apple Silicon problem thing, a bad batch of SSDs or a specific usage pattern.

SSDs are not new in laptops and the last decade would surely have been filled with lawsuits if they all routinely died within a couple of years...

 

[pshufd]

I'd suggest tracking TBWs every month for a while so that you can extrapolate the lifetime and then figure out whether or not to worry.

The expected lifetime for my M1 mini based on past use is about 100 years.

I'm not worrying about it.