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M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear

Surely it is time for Apple to ditech soldiered in SSD,s If they don't in a couple of years time the the second hand market will be over run with M1 Mac,s. In equipment with no upgradeable parts that is built-in obsolescence. I understand you cant use an external drive to run the OS on a M1 Mac..
 
Roxy.music said:
I understand you cant use an external drive to run the OS on a M1 Mac..
Click to expand...

That's a major disappointment if true. Soldered SSD's are just an absolute bane of modern computing, frankly. You trying to tell me there isn't space for an M.2 slot and an NVME drive in a MacBook Pro chassis, honestly?
 
Roxy.music said:
Surely it is time for Apple to ditech soldiered in SSD,s If they don't in a couple of years time the the second hand market will be over run with M1 Mac,s. In equipment with no upgradeable parts that is built-in obsolescence. I understand you cant use an external drive to run the OS on a M1 Mac..
Click to expand...
Unless I missed it this video says nothing about using an external drive to run the OS on a M1 Mac.

Booting an M1 Mac from an external disk: it is possible and How to boot an Apple Silicon Mac from an external drive both go through the steps needed to boot from an external SSD. Now if Apple has done something to clobber that (as seems to be the case on some Intel Macs under Catalina) then that is an issue. But I have seen nothing about the boot option not working anymore.
 
It’s probably a bug in a daemon causing a large number of writes to disk (I’ve seen some daemon bugs before that resulted in some ridiculously high CPU and disk usage, and this seems consistent with the disk usage issue). Quite possibly one of the Spotlight or TimeMachine indexing daemons
 
Chicane-UK said:
That's a major disappointment if true. Soldered SSD's are just an absolute bane of modern computing, frankly. You trying to tell me there isn't space for an M.2 slot and an NVME drive in a MacBook Pro chassis, honestly?
Click to expand...
It is yes. There certainly is room in the Mac Mini and you could have two in the 2012 modals M2 drives take very little space anyway .They will have to go back to the drawing board and replace the soldered ones for ones you can replace.
 
Maximara said:
Unless I missed it this video says nothing about using an external drive to run the OS on a M1 Mac.

Booting an M1 Mac from an external disk: it is possible and How to boot an Apple Silicon Mac from an external drive both go through the steps needed to boot from an external SSD. Now if Apple has done something to clobber that (as seems to be the case on some Intel Macs under Catalina) then that is an issue. But I have seen nothing about the boot option not working anymore.
Click to expand...
It does not but i did not say it did. That is another issue all together..
 
This is a major problem if just one of the soldered components died, the entire system needs an apple repair, new mobo, GPU, ram, flash /SSD storage, etc. Will apple make it cost effective forms repair? Have they ever done so out of the warranty period?
Being a new adoptee of the new silicon processor iMac could be risky business yet my partner wants next gen, as they won't suck it up for an 'old intel grey screen'..!! There could be trouble ahead...
 
it may be a bug or a design limitation, but at least for now, on a M1 based Mac, it must be a Thunderbolt connected drive, which is generally a SSD as only SSDs can take advantage of a Thunderbolt port's top speed. USB-C connected drives are for data only. You cannot boot from one.
 
BradMacPro said:
it may be a bug or a design limitation, but at least for now, on a M1 based Mac, it must be a Thunderbolt connected drive, which is generally a SSD as only SSDs can take advantage of a Thunderbolt port's top speed. USB-C connected drives are for data only. You cannot boot from one.
Click to expand...
How does not being able to take full advantage of the speed equal “not work at all“? Why couldn’t you simply buy a thunderbolt port external SATA chassis and slap a huge magnetic disk in it?
 
toke lahti said:
I'm on Mojave also, mini2018. But external sata ssd. 67Tb, 16k hours.
That's 4.27 GB per hour.
Too much if you ask me.
Click to expand...
So your 2018 mini has this too? I guess it has always been like this then, except people are paying far closer attention to the M1, being new and all.
 
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JustDon'tBuyApple said:
The 2013 Macbook Air A1465 used a 2280 M.2 SSD, with a proprietary connector of course. If it could be done then they could at the very least use a 2242 SSD. (Half the size)

But then the thing would have resell value.


Swap file usage is all about how much RAM your machine has available and what you are doing with it. Linux, like all OS's, will happily put a bunch of stuff on the swap file if you don't have enough RAM and set it up to do so.

No way this isn't a bug in MacOS.
Click to expand...
I’ll disagree. Windows (and apparently Mac OSX) use swap *all the time* even when plenty of RAM is available. Linux doesn’t.
 
BradMacPro said:
it may be a bug or a design limitation, but at least for now, on a M1 based Mac, it must be a Thunderbolt connected drive, which is generally a SSD as only SSDs can take advantage of a Thunderbolt port's top speed. USB-C connected drives are for data only. You cannot boot from one.
Click to expand...

The information out there is a confusing mess.

While How to start up your M1 Mac from an external drive does state "A Thunderbolt 3 drive. That’s not just one that uses the USB-C connector, but is a native USB 3.1 or 3.2 drive. Nor can you use a Type A adapter for a USB 3.0 or later drive. Success appears to require a native Thunderbolt 3 drive.", Booting an M1 Mac from an external disk: it is possible effectively says the exact opposite:

"if you only have SATA SSDs which connect via USB-C rather than Thunderbolt, you may be successful, but it seems unlikely. Some suggest that if your SSD isn’t Thunderbolt, try connecting it via a USB-A port, although that doesn’t help those with MacBook Air or Pro models"

How to Boot a Mac from an External Drive or Alternate Startup Disk says "This option on boot trick works for quite literally any boot volume, whether it’s an external USB drive of any sort, a Thunderbolt hard drive, boot DVD, CD, the Recovery partition, even in dual-boot environments with other versions of OS X, or a Linux or a Windows partition with Boot Camp, if it’s bootable and connected to the Mac it will be visible at this boot manager."

Boot from external disk on M1 Mac in Apple's Community Center states: "In February, Big Sur 11.2 was released, so I wondered if I could create Big Sur beta 11.2 on a USB-C(named USB-C1) disk as in the previous step, and successfully create and boot. You can now use Thunderbolt, USB-A and USB-C."

Someone else in that same thread tated "It seems at this point in time, you need "just the right drive" to get it two work. Some cases USB-C drives connected with Thunderbolt 3 cables would work but if connected with USB-C cables they wouldn't. Some cases a drive would seem to boot fine only to find out later it wouldn't boot. Most of the issues I have seen had been with any USB based drive as being a toss up as to whether it would work. Thunderbolt 3 drives seem to have the highest success rate." (sic)

Pulling all that together it seems that we have something akin to the "fun" we had back in the day with multiple SCSI devices - if you didn't have them set up just so they wouldn't work correctly.
 
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You know what is sad? People defending this with ridiculous "But it's 2 months for 1% lmao" not looking at actual power on hours, where it is ridiculous. Here is my 1TB ssd from samsung in lenovo laptop for comparison (less than year old):

Code: 
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        46 Celsius
Available Spare:                    100%
Available Spare Threshold:          10%
Percentage Used:                    1%
Data Units Read:                    37 043 546 [18,9 TB]
Data Units Written:                 30 045 664 [15,3 TB]
Host Read Commands:                 358 015 260
Host Write Commands:                255 894 003
Controller Busy Time:               2 480
Power Cycles:                       331
Power On Hours:                     3 300
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   56
Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
Error Information Log Entries:      64
Warning  Comp. Temperature Time:    0
Critical Comp. Temperature Time:    0
Temperature Sensor 1:               46 Celsius
Temperature Sensor 2:               48 Celsius
Thermal Temp. 1 Transition Count:   1
Thermal Temp. 1 Total Time:         11

1% at 3300 hours!
 
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tis said:
The problem with your close minded statement is the fact that SSD’s aren’t failing. You are complaining about a problem that doesn’t yet exist. Do you complain that your hamburger is burned before you start cooking it as well?
Click to expand...
Sounds like you didn't read my comment carefully. The latest MacBook Pro doesn't have removable SSD, GPU, memory, etc. If I need to replace them, I have to replace the logic board or buy new one.
 
Roxy.music said:
It is yes. There certainly is room in the Mac Mini and you could have two in the 2012 modals M2 drives take very little space anyway .They will have to go back to the drawing board and replace the soldered ones for ones you can replace.
Click to expand...
Mini's internal design at the moment just SHOUTS "planned obsolescence".
I'd like to hear any good argument against that.
Also, there used to be 2 or 3 internal mass storages in mini and in all macs. Now there's mostly just one. Because the other one is iCloud.
"Don't buy music cd's" all over again.
 
kc9hzn said:
It’s probably a bug in a daemon causing a large number of writes to disk (I’ve seen some daemon bugs before that resulted in some ridiculously high CPU and disk usage, and this seems consistent with the disk usage issue). Quite possibly one of the Spotlight or TimeMachine indexing daemons
Click to expand...
And this bug has been there for years now?
At least from Mojave...
 
flopticalcube said:
Even for a 128GB drive that is a very small number. At 3000 cycles you have about 15 years of life in the drive at that rate.
Click to expand...
Wrong, I'm using 1TB WD Blue, which has TBW of 400TB.
17% of that is used now, so it is very good value for the money.
Compared to Apple's soldered ssd.
When the soldered ssd dies, lets say 7 years after the purchase, most likely, you can't even buy a spare part. Even if you can, its price is like 10x compared just the ssd.
There must be millions of macs used at the moment, which are older than that.
Soldered ssd is simply shortened lifespan.
Apple can justify this however they like it "hardly no-one is upgrading", but they can't deny it.
 
Last edited:
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Enerccio said:
You know what is sad? People defending this with ridiculous "But it's 2 months for 1% lmao" not looking at actual power on hours, where it is ridiculous. Here is my 1TB ssd from samsung in lenovo laptop for comparison (less than year old):

Code: 
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        46 Celsius
Available Spare:                    100%
Available Spare Threshold:          10%
Percentage Used:                    1%
Data Units Read:                    37 043 546 [18,9 TB]
Data Units Written:                 30 045 664 [15,3 TB]
Host Read Commands:                 358 015 260
Host Write Commands:                255 894 003
Controller Busy Time:               2 480
Power Cycles:                       331
Power On Hours:                     3 300
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   56
Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
Error Information Log Entries:      64
Warning  Comp. Temperature Time:    0
Critical Comp. Temperature Time:    0
Temperature Sensor 1:               46 Celsius
Temperature Sensor 2:               48 Celsius
Thermal Temp. 1 Transition Count:   1
Thermal Temp. 1 Total Time:         11

1% at 3300 hours!
Click to expand...
This thread has brought up info about the difference between NVMe and SATA SMART.
That 3300 h can be "power on, but not writing", but in NVMe those "power-on" seconds are only those, when there has been writing to disk.
 
toke lahti said:
Mini's internal design at the moment just SHOUTS "planned obsolescence".
I'd like to hear any good argument against that.
Also, there used to be 2 or 3 internal mass storages in mini and in all macs. Now there's mostly just one. Because the other one is iCloud.
"Don't buy music cd's" all over again.
Click to expand...
Nothing new Apple has been going in this direction for years, one simply has to accept if you want to use a modern Mac. Nor will this situation change unless Apple perceives it's damaging it's reputation or internal SSD's start prematurely failing in very significant numbers, similar to the Butterfly Keyboard. Apple clearly want's it's products to be 100% under it's control, inclusive of expansion and repair...

I don't like it myself.

Q-6
 
ghanwani said:
It looks like this is actually a thing!

CoconutBattery has an advanced viewer available for $9.95 which shows SSD health.

Is it worth it? Does it give any more info than what is available using smartmontools?
Click to expand...
I would recommend Gsmartcontrol, which is a GUI front-end for smartmontools. The information that coconut-flavour gives you seems to be basically what the SMART system built-in to the SSD/HDD gives you. (Which Gsmartcontrol can also give you

pdoherty said:
I’ll disagree. Windows (and apparently Mac OSX) use swap *all the time* even when plenty of RAM is available. Linux doesn’t.
Click to expand...
It'd certainly be interesting to see what algorithm Windows/MacOS uses to force stuff to a page-file. You can change swappiness value in linux, at least with modern versions.
 
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