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How crazy to buy an iMac with the 256GB drive.
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In terms of SSD health and lifespan, I thought I'd look at my own MacBook Pro to see how it's doing. The usual disclaimers apply: this is anecdotal evidence, and I'm not comparing like to like since my MBP is an Intel model.
Anyways, I'm using a 2017 Intel MacBook Pro with the rather embarrassingly small 121gb SSD and 8gb of RAM. Compared to Apple silicone Macs this machine is archaic, and as one may expect it does show swap usage (though my memory pressure is generally green, so I think it's just reserving SSD space to use as swap in a pinch). Like most Intel MacBooks of its era it tends to run hot. I also filled that SSD up pretty quickly and typically only have between 25-15gb of empty space on it. This has been my daily computer since 2018. Basically this is a pretty bad scenario for SSD health - a small drive that is typically filled up and is possibly being hit with swap usage. I will add that in recent years I have moved to storing most of my files on external drives, though.
I'm using DriveDx to find the following figures. According to this application, my SSD has a lifetime total of 125.3tb written to it. The overall life percentage used has a raw value of 35. Divide this by 5.5 - the amount of years I've been using this, roughly speaking - and you get 6.36 per year. If the drive fails when it reaches 100 that means that I can expect a total of around 15.7 years out of my SSD. Of course, this is not a hard figure - the drive could go past 100 (DriveDx apparently counts up to 254) or fail before 100. It's just a very rough estimate.
As a point of comparison I'll link this video by Created Tech, which is how I found out about DriveDx. Created Tech ran it on a base level M1 MacBook Air that had 105.5tb written to its 256gb SSD over a single year. Created Tech noted that this level of usage is abnormal, and is the result of extensive benchmark testing. Anyways, his M1 shows a life percentage of 7, meaning that he can expect around 14.2 years of SSD life before it reaches 100. This is is less than the 15.7 I got - but it is assuming that he continues writing over 100tb of data to his drive every year, while I've only been writing around 23tb of data to my drive each year. So that points to the M1 being potentially far better at maintaining SSD health than my Intel Mac.
Again, this is all anecdotal - just two data points. How much you use your SSD will obviously play a big role in how long it lasts. Based on my figures and those found by Created Tech I would say that you probably don't have to worry about SSD usage leading to a shortened life for your Mac, even if it has a 256gb drive, unless you are writing a ton of data to it each year (and if you are, you probably aren't interested in a 256gb model) and plan on using it for more than a decade.
Anyways, I'm using a 2017 Intel MacBook Pro with the rather embarrassingly small 121gb SSD and 8gb of RAM. Compared to Apple silicone Macs this machine is archaic, and as one may expect it does show swap usage (though my memory pressure is generally green, so I think it's just reserving SSD space to use as swap in a pinch). Like most Intel MacBooks of its era it tends to run hot. I also filled that SSD up pretty quickly and typically only have between 25-15gb of empty space on it. This has been my daily computer since 2018. Basically this is a pretty bad scenario for SSD health - a small drive that is typically filled up and is possibly being hit with swap usage. I will add that in recent years I have moved to storing most of my files on external drives, though.
I'm using DriveDx to find the following figures. According to this application, my SSD has a lifetime total of 125.3tb written to it. The overall life percentage used has a raw value of 35. Divide this by 5.5 - the amount of years I've been using this, roughly speaking - and you get 6.36 per year. If the drive fails when it reaches 100 that means that I can expect a total of around 15.7 years out of my SSD. Of course, this is not a hard figure - the drive could go past 100 (DriveDx apparently counts up to 254) or fail before 100. It's just a very rough estimate.
As a point of comparison I'll link this video by Created Tech, which is how I found out about DriveDx. Created Tech ran it on a base level M1 MacBook Air that had 105.5tb written to its 256gb SSD over a single year. Created Tech noted that this level of usage is abnormal, and is the result of extensive benchmark testing. Anyways, his M1 shows a life percentage of 7, meaning that he can expect around 14.2 years of SSD life before it reaches 100. This is is less than the 15.7 I got - but it is assuming that he continues writing over 100tb of data to his drive every year, while I've only been writing around 23tb of data to my drive each year. So that points to the M1 being potentially far better at maintaining SSD health than my Intel Mac.
Again, this is all anecdotal - just two data points. How much you use your SSD will obviously play a big role in how long it lasts. Based on my figures and those found by Created Tech I would say that you probably don't have to worry about SSD usage leading to a shortened life for your Mac, even if it has a 256gb drive, unless you are writing a ton of data to it each year (and if you are, you probably aren't interested in a 256gb model) and plan on using it for more than a decade.
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Like I said the speed is the issue. The smaller sizes are slower now (compared to previous models) for business reasons - not technical ones. Unfortunately now you have to bump your size to maintain the same speed as before (if you actually need it). But don’t blame it on the size - Apple nerfed the speed on purpose.
But again you have to need it. By having a Thunderbolt external at all you are in a very low-percentage group. Most people are using USB 3.2, which any of the base models are going to pair with just fine.
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Your post is a bit unclear to me. Can you specify the "SSD Lifetime Left Indicator" on the DriveDx report?
Thanks.
richmlow
I'll try. I'm not a computer engineer or anything so I'm just going off of what I've read. Anyways, most SSDs support a monitoring system called SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology). Some manufactures include an attribute called lifetime used/remaining. Here's a description from Crucial's website:
In the case of my computer, the SSD has a remaining value of 65 and thus a used of 35 (100-65=35). This is after 5.5 years of usage, so I can calculate that with my average level of usage I can expect around 15.7 years of usage for my SSD (or about 10.2 years remaining, since I've already had this computer for 5.5 years) before the lifetime remaining value is 0.
Again, this is just one data point. Maybe my drive lasts well beyond that. Maybe it fails tomorrow. It's just an estimate.
For a desktop computer, getting an external drive if you need more local is perfectly reasonable in a way it’s not for a laptop.
It's not? Sure one could argue that all SSDs will get much slower when they are full. But at twice the capacity the SSD will hold double the data before it is full.
Ehm, no you couldn't. An iMac with 256GB SSD and 8GB RAM will literally crash when you try to fill it with more than 264GB worth of data. At which point the 512GB drive is still only half full and running at full speed.
It's only at its worst, because it isn't as capable. When you compare an 8GB and a 16GB machine both running an app that needs 10GB of memory, you wouldn't say that's an unfair comparison either.
Nonetheless even under the best circumstances a single NAND SSD is always at least about ~30% slower on write and ~50% slower on read speeds. And for most single-core and multi-core tasks the M3 is only 20-30% faster than the M1, not twice as fast. Apple's up to 2× marketing claim is intentionally putting the M1 in the worst possible light, while hiding the flaws of the M3 base model.
Apple's communication is even less honest than MaxTech's. Without these Tech YouTubers we wouldn't even know about the issue. Personally I can't afford to but every single new Mac model to run my own benchmarks. So I will keep linking to those, who do it as part of a dramatized infotainment show.
I could just as arbitrarily say "someone with a 256GB SSD isn't the type of person who would fill it to the brim while someone who went through the trouble of upgrading probably has more serious work to do with is, so a fair comparison is a 512GB unit loaded to the gills and a 256GB unit with plenty of space making smaller transfers". Or worse, I could show the results without explaining that justification. That would be a bad benchmark. Just like the MaxTech nonsense is a bad benchmark. There are lots of ways to do it badly, but fewer ways to do it right.
Most important of all is to be clear and honest about what you've done and present the results in context, and MaxTech violates that rule over and over again. I had to scrub through that video in great detail to understand why the results were so nonsensical, and they did and continue to do everything they can to hide and distort it. I've noticed more recently they've stopped revealing the kinds of detail I used to unravel their results, I don't think that's a coincidence. They don't want to publish repeatable experiments and allow others to reproduce their work-- and the tech media seems ok with that because they seem to keep linking back to clearly bogus results without a second thought.
You aren't comparing the M1 to the M3 here. You're comparing systems with different memory, and if you're showing results cherry picked to emphasize that difference without clearly stating that's what you're doing, that's a garbage analysis.
That's not correct. To the extent you can trust anything they put on camera, even the MaxTech data tells a different story once you look at it clearly:
15 is not at least 30.
You'll have to link me to the claim you're criticizing.
It's all drama, no info, and barely 'tainment. I get that you want to frame Apple as the baddie here, but you've shown nothing that indicates their communication is less honest. I linked to you a detailed analysis of the inaccurate, undisciplined and dishonest content MaxTech produces. But I see it's important to you that it be somehow valid, and I'm going to stop trying to disabuse you of that notion. If this is how science and engineering work for you, I simply can't explain any more clearly why that's wrong, so I'll have to leave you with that belief.
You're welcome to echo whatever nonsense you find online, but in this case it's a disservice to the person asking the question and I'll continue correcting that nonsense where I can.
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Use that 256gb as the boot disk, and buy external SSD for your data. You can also attach the external SSD to back of monitor via 3m tape.
More and more business actions are done or can be done in the browser these days so space isn’t scaling as fast. On the other hand video editors and others need way more than even an 8TB can provide. I have a relatively small internal drive. I also have multiple NAS and external SSDs. I have a mix of 10Gbe and 25Gb network and the external SSDs are new so they are fast. I prefer that over having internal storage.
Seriously. Even SATA 2 speeds is almost enough to edit 8K RAW footage.
SSDs greatest benefits are the access times. Day to day I don’t notice any big difference between a Windows 7 box in 2013 with an SSD and today.
That’s the key issue with so many of these complaints. It seems most of the complainers are just hobbyists wanting the high numbers like the PC gaming culture. If you are truly a professional where the speeds matter, the price isn’t a real issue.
Could you put your disdain for MaxTech aside and argue the issue of SSD speed? Ars Technica and other more reputable sources didn't came around to test the new iMacs yet.
M2 MacBook Pro’s 256GB SSD is only about half as fast as the M1 version’s
512GB version of the new MacBook Pro has a slower SSD than the Mac it replaces
Even the 512GB base SSDs paired with the M2 Pro chips in a Mac mini Pro and MacBook Pro 14" and 16" were still using single NAND SSDs and therefore slower than their 1TB counterparts.
iFixit − Inside Apple's M3 MacBook Pro
And the base M3 Pro MBP with 512GB suddenly comes with 4× 128GB NAND chips. So these chips still exist and no Mac needs to be slowed down by a single NAND config.
It's the only performance claim they make on their website, Here's the fine print:
Not the same amount of RAM, largest SSD to completely avoid the single NAND issue and only one specific video editing task, for which a beta version of Premiere Pro was already optimized to make use of the new GPU capabilities.
In capitalism up to means the following number is exaggerated to the Max (not Tech).
A discussion of the issues to be considered is appreciated. However, I must inject that I don’t think there’s any way I’d notice the speed difference between two SSD’s. Except at startup, I never really noticed a big difference when we moved from HD’s to SSD’s for the main drive.
I thought it was widely accepted that the colorful 24" iMacs are consumer products now?
Oh, you certainly did! You just didn't attribute the performance gains to SSD vs HDD, but everyone needs a fast drive. The Macs of old pulled all kinds of tricks to hide the fact how much of a bottleneck that spinning disk was. This is the reason for why everyone wanted as much RAM in their computer as possible, to not load the same data twice or trice from disk. Don't you remember that app icons used to bounce a couple of times in the dock before a program was ready to use? That's disk speed.
And 8GB / 256GB setup is fine for people like my grandparents that JUST USE Facebook and Email every couple days.
Noticed? Yes. Cared? No. I’m an old guy. I remember having a program on a floppy disk and having to swap that out after it loaded the program into memory so I could insert the data disk. HD’s were magnificent. When the SSD’s came there’s no doubt that startup was sped up considerably. But, reading a file in from a HD, which is my current set up on a Win machine, seems pretty seamless. Part of that is obviously that my files aren’t large like they were when I was working. But, even a common task like looking through my pictures is done so quickly, reading from an HD, that I just scroll right through from one picture to another with no perceived wait. There may be cashing going on in the ram, but whatever’s going on, I can’t imagine any scenario, in my use case, that I would notice the difference if I were to change out my data drive from a HD to an SSD. I feel even more confident that I would not perceive a difference between two SSD’s.
And the M1 is fine for your grandparents (who don't run Premiere Pro) too and it's much cheaper and it comes with dual NAND chips. The base model is often the preferred option for most customers. If your grandparents don't play RTX games for Mac, they won't benefit much from an M3 iMac.
We're all old guys, young guys haven't learned how to operate a file system to begin with. We're the last generation of humans to understand the desktop PC metaphor introduced by the original Macintosh in 1984. PC sales numbers are on a steady decline.
File not found
Students don't know what files and folders are, professors say
Then you're in for a surprise when you switch to any Apple Silicon Mac. 😲
Definitely not − everything will be so fast, you wont even see your photos fly by. 😆
My grand parents can’t even tell the difference between an SSD and a HDD. The SSD speed “issue” is massively overblown.
I can do that: SSD speed variations do not matter for almost all the things most people do on their computers.
There, that's it.
If you are are one of the tiny minority of people moving terabytes of data daily for some database, then yes, get SSDs with those whopping large transfer speeds for continuous blocks of data.
But again, almost everything nearly all computer users do have random access of small-ish files, and the speeds for random access of small files are pretty close for any of the Apple SSD options.
You keep putting MaxTech front and center, so setting it aside isn't really an option. You quoted their BS 1/6th number, you linked their video, and insisted you're going to keep quoting them because you think they have value. You're citing them as support for your claims and they aren't a reputable citation.
If you read back you'll see that I did argue the issue of SSD speed when I asked what large file transfers you're talking about. I linked you to description of why MaxTech are useless and got to the more important point: The internal drive is still faster than most external drives can support, far faster than an SD card, and about the speed of a high priced CF Express cards through a high priced Thunderbolt reader and copies on the local drive are instantaneous because of the file system. The number of places you'll be limited by the internal SSD are vanishingly small and essentially irrelevant for a drive of this minuscule size.
Yet you keep bringing the conversation back to MaxTech...
That Ars article does not testing of its own, it just links to MaxTech which is just further evidence of how far Ars has deteriorated since Siracusa departed.
That's right. Fewer chips means less parallelism means slower data transfer. Not one sixth the speed, mind you. That number remains nonsense.
To repeat myself yet again: 50% less chips showed a theoretical slowdown of 40% using an isolated benchmark and 15% slowdown in a test meant to mimic a grueling drive limited use case. There is no reason to think 50% fewer chips would yield the 83% slowdown you claimed or even the 50% number you claimed was best case.
You can't give bogus numbers wrapped in hyperbole and then claim to be accurate just because you got the sign right.
Here's the fine print:
Not the same amount of RAM, largest SSD to completely avoid the single NAND issue and only one specific video editing task, for which a beta version of Premiere Pro was already optimized to make use of the new GPU capabilities.
Ok, so how was that dishonest? They described and documented their test, using a third party application, and you can repeat it at home. And how would more dishonesty somehow bring balance?
Guys if you’re not aware, there is an amazing group on Facebook called “Dull Men’s Club”. I’m part of it as well. You should join, you will really enjoy the discussions there! No disrespect intended whatsoever 
Just read the the thread and thought of that group.
Just read the the thread and thought of that group.