Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear

NT1440 said:
The fact that Macs run the longest with little user maintenance seems to conflict with this planned obsolescence notion.

My sisters 2009 MBP still runs, so does my friend’s 2010. I just overhauled a clients 2012 iMac, and I stuck an SSD in another’s 2009 iMac which now flies.

These things last, far longer than *most* PCs.
Click to expand...
If you happen to use products from companies like Microsoft or Google, you pretty much need 10.12.
For this, the pre 2010 macs are dead.

Edit:2012->2010.
 
Last edited:
toke lahti said:
If you happen to use products from companies like Microsoft or Google, you pretty much need 10.12.
For this, the pre 2012 macs are dead.
Click to expand...
10.12 runs on a variety of pre-2012 Macs, what are you talking about? I’m running 10.13.6 on my Late 2011 15” MacBook Pro. My 2010 iMac can run 10.13.6 as well, it is currently running 10.12. Early 2009 kit is spotty and is generally stuck at 10.11.6, but most late 2009 and up Macs can go all the way to High Sierra.
 
  • Like
Reactions: rhett7660
Think we need to question what kernel_task is doing all the time.
Constantly writes to ssd.
Does not seem to run at all in Mojave or Catalina on Mini 2018 i3 8gb.
My Bit Defender virus scanner will log as writes for entire drive - 120 gb

edit: pic of Catalina no kernel_task running. On Big Sur kernel_task does not stop.
 

Attachments

  • Screen Shot 2021-02-24 at 8.10.22 AM.png
    Screen Shot 2021-02-24 at 8.10.22 AM.png
    136.8 KB · Views: 108
Last edited:
colinzim said:
Think we need to question what kernel_task is doing all the time.
Constantly writes to ssd.
Does not seem to run at all in Mojave or Catalina on Mini 2018 i3 8gb.
My Bit Defender virus scanner will log as writes for entire drive - 120 gb
Click to expand...
kernel_task doesn't show... But Bit Defender, what the?

Honestly the rest looks normal tho, what macos version is that?
 
  • Like
Reactions: hop
colinzim said:
Think we need to question what kernel_task is doing all the time.
Constantly writes to ssd.
Does not seem to run at all in Mojave or Catalina on Mini 2018 i3 8gb.
My Bit Defender virus scanner will log as writes for entire drive - 120 gb
Click to expand...
kernel_task is more or less the core of macOS. To show it you have to activate "View -> All Processes" in Activity Monitor, not only yours.

Bit Defender is superfluous.
 
  • Like
Reactions: hop and colinzim
twistedpixel8 said:
From a company whose marketing is heavily based on how “eco-friendly” their products are, I’d say Apple needs to be better than they are and I’m certainly not alone on this.
Click to expand...
Nobody is saying they can’t do better

youre trying to pin me as an apple apologist or a spokesperson and that I most certainly am not
 
  • Like
Reactions: gank41
User-Removable SSD is like an industry-standard from many reputable brand of laptops and it doesn't include the MacBook Pro. Apple and Tim Cook are like a hypocrite.
 
  • Wow
Reactions: I7guy
Coheebuzz said:
They are replaceable and removable, if you really want to keep using your M1 like 10-15 years from now then it should take a specialist no more than like, 15 minutes to replace your bad soldered CPU/RAM/SSD, if this practice becomes mainstream then so will the equivalent repair services.
Click to expand...

I believe the built-in security 'features' on the M1chip (previously handled by the T2) would prevent anyone but Apple performing some of those replacement tasks. So probably not happening.
 
toke lahti said:
If you happen to use products from companies like Microsoft or Google, you pretty much need 10.12.
For this, the pre 2012 macs are dead.
Click to expand...

My 2011 Mac mini running 10.13 (and Windows 10) says hello. My husbands 2009 white MacBook running 10.13 also says hello.
 
Toutou said:
Definitely not a speculation at this point. There are machines out there reporting hundreds of terabytes written in two months. Something IS wrong, we just don't know whether it's just write reporting or the actual writes.
Click to expand...

I am saying that the people freaking out and losing their mind are doing so over speculation that their devices are suddenly going to blow up or become useless in the next year, just read through this thread and its 80% of the posts.

Since these systems are not walled garden iOS devices the ability to run anything the user wants makes me more suspicious that people reporting hundreds of TB written might be running some weird applications that they don't fully understand. If everyone was seeing that figure it would be a very different story, but those users are few and so far I have seen no data on what they run on those systems. I am by no means saying Apple couldn't have screwed up, they have done it plenty of times. I've just seen this forum blow up over the dumbest rumors, it's happening again in this thread. People should just report the issue to Apple and wait for a reply, rather we have almost 20 pages of discussion on a couple of tweets.
 
  • Love
  • Like
Reactions: Ethosik and MysticCow
averagenerd81 said:
Since these systems are not walled garden iOS devices the ability to run anything the user wants makes me more suspicious that people reporting hundreds of TB written might be running some weird applications that they don't fully understand.
Click to expand...

This is what I am leaning toward also. I can't fully blame Apple or any third party in particular, but we know something is screwy. A simple thing like not being fully optimized for an M1 Mac might lead into write write write write write write...and that could come from ANY developer, including Apple.
 
Zdigital2015 said:
10.12 runs on a variety of pre-2012 Macs, what are you talking about? I’m running 10.13.6 on my Late 2011 15” MacBook Pro. My 2010 iMac can run 10.13.6 as well, it is currently running 10.12. Early 2009 kit is spotty and is generally stuck at 10.11.6, but most late 2009 and up Macs can go all the way to High Sierra.
Click to expand...
Okay, I remebered the year wrong, I'll correct my post after hooverin in Mactracker.
Right year would be pre 2010?
 
Cyprusian said:
I'm not seeing what others see either on my 2014 13" Retina MBP running iStat Menus version 6.51. Rather than seeing the lifetime left under Status I see "S.M.A.R.T Status Passed" ......
Click to expand...

Same here. Tried going through all the options I could find but see no way to enable "SSD Lifetime". And yes, I have the version downloaded from the website and it's bought and paid for. 🤷‍♂️
 
  • Like
Reactions: Cyprusian
Toutou said:
I agree that people sometimes do stupid things with their machines, but some people over at Hacker News are also experiencing the issue, and that's a pretty competent crowd.
Click to expand...
It's still an Internet forum that seems to allow anyone to sign up and post. Clearly there are smart people there, but it's a public forum just like here. I'll still reserve my freaking out for when Apple says "oh hey guys, yeah we fixed that .. it was a real issue" or denies it and we see failures. Until then, life is normal.
 
Here's a data point of why I am not freaking out about the smartctl data.

Yesterday around this time (45 minutes difference) I posted my smartctl data (2nd page of this thread) which showed a value of 70 for Power On Hours. Today, just minutes ago I polled the SMART data again...

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 41 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 0%
Data Units Read: 7,236,272 [3.70 TB]
Data Units Written: 3,414,729 [1.74 TB]
Host Read Commands: 115,870,648
Host Write Commands: 51,803,785
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 170
Power On Hours: 71
Unsafe Shutdowns: 3
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0

I use this Air for work and personal usage. Yesterday I was on this machine for 8 hours during work and then another 2 hours after. Yet the increment here is of a single hour.

Checking the meaning of power on hours (to make sure it isn't some dumb "you think it means this but it really means this), it is exactly what you think it should be.
 
Anybody knows what this means in 1TB WD Blue SSD's SMART:
Code: 
233 NAND_GB_Written_TLC     0x0032   100   100   ---    Old_age   Always       -       62056
234 NAND_GB_Written_SLC     0x0032   100   100   ---    Old_age   Always       -       67017
Does the SSD have both SLC & TLC? Internal fusion ssd?

Edit:
Seems to be that it has 8GB SLC cache.
Which is in very much in use!
67017 / 8 = SLC part has been overwritten for almost 8400 times! w00t?
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back