my 2017 i7 15" MBP on Catalina - it's at 1.26PB and 121% but seems to be working fine:
my 3 week old M1 Mac Mini 16GB/512:
my 3 week old M1 Mac Mini 16GB/512:
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M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear
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From a search on that product it looks like they have an 8GB cache that is SLC.
Let's just shut the message board down. Will that be acceptable to you? (Hint: you could just ignore the thread, like I ignore threads that don't interest me).
I considered this when I first started seeing excessive kernel activity / disk writing. In discussion with Apple Support I erased the disk, did a clean install of Big Sur and manually and gradually rebuilt my profile. I used the M1, logged in via iCloud, but not initially adding any third-party apps and the excessive kernel activity was present. With the first migration-based install, I was seeing lots of beach balling after a few hours of uptime. After the clean install, I have no performance issues (even after adding back in all of my regular apps).
It's odd you think this isn't of interest to me. Me not freaking out about it doesn't mean I am not interested in a topic.
They say hello to M1 Macs also right now. Is there a point?
And if you want to talk INsecurity, try running my PowerPC Macs in OS 9 on Classilla. Or in 10.4/5 with TenFourFox.
I've got the 8gb RAM model, had it since 26th November, use it 3 to 4 hours a day, mostly for Logic Pro X.
I guess it depends on how heavy your usage is, or maybe how many apps are running through Rosetta? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 27 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 0%
Data Units Read: 15,130,549 [7.74 TB]
Data Units Written: 10,512,430 [5.38 TB]
Host Read Commands: 108,263,955
Host Write Commands: 87,165,576
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 173
Power On Hours: 77
Unsafe Shutdowns: 9
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
I guess it depends on how heavy your usage is, or maybe how many apps are running through Rosetta? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 27 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 0%
Data Units Read: 15,130,549 [7.74 TB]
Data Units Written: 10,512,430 [5.38 TB]
Host Read Commands: 108,263,955
Host Write Commands: 87,165,576
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 173
Power On Hours: 77
Unsafe Shutdowns: 9
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
Who on this thread is "freaking out". A lot of people expressing concern. I was going to jump on a refurb today but will hold off until this is resolved.
Oh it's the usual complaints:
Apple screwing us because they engineered a bad product; Apple screwed us by putting soldered SSDs when the device is going to die in a year; This is why you never buy first generation products; "I should have not bought this product, the resale is plummeting!"
It's the usual tripe spewed here. You're welcome to review the past 20 pages if you actually want to find out.
It is not a question of RAM. MacOS is written by idiots. Most of what otherwise would be free memory is occupied by cached files (check your activity monitor). Instead of reducing the cached amount when the memory pressure increases and when the compressed ram can't hold more, RAM content is swapped on the SSD. MacOS also writes excessively (on my machine with Firefox set to minimum writes) - at least 10GB per day. My Linux box with the same amount of RAM (16GB) writes less than 200MB daily. The SSD life is simple to calculate. TLC can sustain ~1000 writes per cell. So you take the free space on your SSD multiply by 1000 and divide by the daily usage. If 128GB are free on a SSD of any size, if MacOS writes 20GB per day, we have 128*1000/20=6400 days or 17 years. If you write twice that amount each day, the life will be halved to a little more than 8 years. And I've personally seen 100GB writes per day!!!
Apple solders the SSD, so that the excessive writes by MacOS, will kill the drive after the warranty expires and you will have to buy a new computer.
I would be very concerned, if there is a true issue, about soldered SSDs and the resale of my product. There is another thread, with some very bright people (way smarter than me) posting in it, who are concerned about the inexplicable SSD usage and the impact on the life expectancy of the SSD.
While people may use hyperbole, the hyperbole is no better or worse than the hyperbole I see from the same people over and over defending Apple on almost every thread (not directed at you).
Personally, I'm concerned enough to see how this shakes out before I buy (I was literally ready to buy one of the refurbs that came out last night) and to see if 8gig of ram has any influence vs 16. I don't want to be in a position of buying something that becomes essentially worthless in two years (if that is the case)....right now....I just am not confident either way.
Yesterday at this time, my M1 MBP 2TB/16GB received on Nov 27 was showing 22.7 TBW. As of right now it's showing 22.9 TBW, which definitely seems more in line with "real world use" day over day. Power on Hours was 601 yesterday and is now 607 today. I've never reinstalled macOS, though, and although I do have a lot of files kept locally (hence the need for the 2TB model), other than recording in LPX, the only other app I have that would write a lot of GBs would be the Parallels Tech Preview running Windows 10 on ARM. The VM I have in place for that is just under 30GB in size, and I use that sparingly. Maybe once or twice a week. The more and more I look into this, the more I'm thinking that macOS or the SMART utility needs to be addressed to better show data written to flash storage and maybe not include any Memory used. People are concerned about swap, but if it's an SoC isn't ALL data written to the same flash storage? Data and RAM? Isn't that kind of the point of it all? To be all encompassing to be faster? In 24 hours, Activity Monitor is showing 364.12 GB of Data written, which lines up with the numbers listed with smartmontools via Terminal. I mentioned this in another post, but wouldn't any local Time Machine snapshots also be included in what's written to the "SSD"? And then if I've got a 2 TB drive that's ⅔ filled, that info would be written to a local Time Machine snapshot, too? I'm not exactly sure how APFS and local Time Machine snapshots work. Just spitballing here.
It is not a bug! MacOS has always been excessive on writes with launchd and kernel_task being the worst offenders. No other operating system behaves this way. And YES, I also have Linux and Windows computers.
Just for the sake of assuaging some of worry: I've got quite a few 4GB and 8GB MacBook Airs and 8GB MacBook Pros w/Retina from as far back as 2012 with the built-in Apple solid-state storage in education deployment. The Airs only have 120GB of storage. Zero of these have experience any storage-related failures to date. The "Disk Drill SSD Health Level" on an 8GB 2012 MacBook Pro Retina with 250GB SSD reports at "96% for whatever that's worth, on a machine that's been hammered on pretty hard every school-day for 8 years. I realize that's not the same test being run in this thread, but I'm not going to bother installing homebrew to do this. Unless something has gone catastrophically wrong with BigSur (which, let's be honest, is certainly possible), then we *probably* don't have anything major to worry about. If something has gone wrong and BigSur really is writing massive amounts of data as reported, then *probably* Apple will fix it, because they really don't want the class-action lawsuits and horrible press they will get when their OS causes their computers to die in just a handful of years. Either way, it's going to take a lot of failures on Apple's part for this to impact end-users. Apple would have to be the kind of company that designs, builds and sells an utterly failed industry-worst keyboard for 5 years straight to let something like this get away from them, and they couldn't be that kind of company, could they? (Wait, I didn't do a very good job of assuaging worry, did I? But really, unlike the keyboard travesty, I do expect this will turn out to be either a temporary glitch or a non-issue.)
The issue is it doesn't matter how "smart" these people are. They do not have full visibility into the issue and that is something that we must wait on Apple for, end of story. We can discuss it which can be fun because it is a process of discovery, but people jumping to conclusions over this are just absurd.
I am unsure of why anyone on this board would be concerned with soldered SSDs at this point. Apple as been soldering them to the MacBook lineup since 2015. The last intel Mac mini had a soldered SSD. The reality that parts wear out shouldn't be a new thought to anyone, if it is ... I am unsure of what to say.
The other point to this is waiting to purchase is fine, I personally don't care one bit what you do. My wife and I are enjoying the two M1's we have and have no concern about the longevity of them. The reality is if you wait to purchase based on "issues" like this, you will be waiting forever because there are always perceived issues on rumor sites like Macrumors, iMore, etc. There is always the next somethingGATE.
I am by no means discouraging discussion on a topic, it's just the constant freaking out over every rumor is just absurd. It doesn't add a single bit of value to a discussion.
Edit: With that being said I am done with this topic. I look forward to seeing the facts as the emerge down the road. Have a great day everyone.
Unlike the current Apple offerings, your 2012 laptops are all using replaceable SSD-s, so this is not an issue.
I checked and some late 2009 iMac can take up to 10.13.6. I didn’t check any other models listed. I know that my 2010 iMac is supported, mostly because I don’t care much for High Sierra myself but prefer the last supported release on any older hardware I own.
I've wondered about the use of Swap since considering buying a new Mac that has soldered SSD. I don't quite understand fully how RAM works, but I feel like I have a general understanding of it. That said, I can't understand how this scenario works out. I just restarted my computer (New M1 MBP) only opened Safari, this particular thread- went to the last page, logged in, and took this screenshot. How is it that 2 pages of this thread needs 500+ MB written into memory? I'm not saying there is an issue- but would love if anyone could clarify what is going on behind the scenes. I'm familiar with generally what a typical file size would be for misc filetypes, and I can't comprehend why these two pages would equal that much. What am I missing?
Thanks for any insight!
Thanks for any insight!
Attachments
This isn't surprising for the modern web. Many of the elements used in design now employ trackers, widgets (the share to FB, Twitter, etc type widgets) and many other elements all add up to memory usage. Chrome is much worse, 500MB is .. sadly .. not a huge amount.