FUNNY! the M1 machines are LEMONS!
GO INTEL!
GO INTEL!
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M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear
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The SSD's last much longer than these metrics suggest.
Should be fairly simple to identify the process that writes all this data. Unless that step is done, this whole discussion about lack of ram is a bit of nonsense. Could be an M1 specific issue, could also be some 3rd party tool that behaves badly...
This is entirely workload dependent. We had the same problem in the dark ages with Unix machines which the swap disks would wear out when the RAM was underspecified for the job at hand. They didn't give us a countdown though - they just went "clunk" usually on Friday afternoon and ruined the weekend.
But I'm sitting here on an 8Gb/256Gb M1 mini doing software dev, mostly remote and usual Apple desktop apps. Bought the thing a week after it came out and use it 10 hours a day. I've got 1.85Tb written across 50 million writes approx which is fine. No memory pressure issues, floating around 6.6Gb used. This is however a temporary machine until they release an iMac with Apple Silicon in it.
Pay attention to your workload. Buy more RAM if you need it. Buy a larger SSD for wear levelling purposes if you need it.
But I'm sitting here on an 8Gb/256Gb M1 mini doing software dev, mostly remote and usual Apple desktop apps. Bought the thing a week after it came out and use it 10 hours a day. I've got 1.85Tb written across 50 million writes approx which is fine. No memory pressure issues, floating around 6.6Gb used. This is however a temporary machine until they release an iMac with Apple Silicon in it.
Pay attention to your workload. Buy more RAM if you need it. Buy a larger SSD for wear levelling purposes if you need it.
I hope to hold onto my m1 air this long
and probably because it will be devalued quickly with subsequent silicon releases, for all intents and purposes “forever”
I’m not an itchy Mac upgrader
2015 12”
2016 13” No Touch Bar pro bc had a lot more power
2020 Air bc fixed keyboard
2020 Air m1 because battery and thermals weren’t great and performance was comparable to a machine four years prior
before that, 2011 Air because i5 instead of core 2 duo dragged out
true I made some short term leaps, even in the same year last year but when they address the main problem I have, I’m set
Plus In both cases of short term upgrades the upgrade cost was nominal since the prior machine paid for the bulk of the new one
but generslly speaking I’m in it for the long haul
This also applies to the Intel machines.
I thought I'd made a mistake in buying an Intel MacBook Pro a few weeks before the M1s came out. I feel somewhat vindicated right now...
These are wearing parts like a car's tires and need to be replaced by the user when the time comes.
oh wait.
oh wait.
Rich (BB code):
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 22 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 1%
Data Units Read: 10,774,937 [5.51 TB]
Data Units Written: 5,484,325 [2.80 TB]
Host Read Commands: 158,857,520
Host Write Commands: 104,499,408
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 1,941
Power On Hours: 73
Unsafe Shutdowns: 28
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0Had this M1 MBP 16GB/512GB for under 2 months
FWIW, I see on my three year old Mini 8,1 just 3.4 TB written vs the 150TB shown in that example or the 2.8TB in Viktor's two month old machine. Sure, I have 16 GB, but that's absurd for a one month old machine.
Power on hours: 5,000 or so (5,000 power cycles).
I also have an external NVMe drive which oddly has had 18.2TB written to it (I do keep virual machines on it which might be why). That one has only 1,000 hours on it. It's currently 2° warmer (C) though it has no fan and just sits on top of a couple of Legos for air circulation.
Power on hours: 5,000 or so (5,000 power cycles).
I also have an external NVMe drive which oddly has had 18.2TB written to it (I do keep virual machines on it which might be why). That one has only 1,000 hours on it. It's currently 2° warmer (C) though it has no fan and just sits on top of a couple of Legos for air circulation.
Damn, according to my numbers i only have roughly 16 years to learn how to solder.
I ran my mini2018 from external system disk.
Th internal ssd has (by SMARTReporter) only 174 power on hours and Data Units Written 12.3TB.
That makes 71 GB per hour.
Pretty insane...
My external system drive is WD Blue SSD, it does not have clear "Data Units Written" in SMART attributes.
Power on hours are 15635.
GB Written might be attribute 233: "Media_Wearout_Indicator", which is 61993, which might mean that 62 TB written?
WD's specs says that "up to 400 TBW".
So I guess the wear level is 84% ?
Hmm, 241 is Total_LBAs_Written, 20548.
Where can I find a block size of this disk?
...and it shows Sector size is 512, so I don't understand that LBA number...
Th internal ssd has (by SMARTReporter) only 174 power on hours and Data Units Written 12.3TB.
That makes 71 GB per hour.
Pretty insane...
My external system drive is WD Blue SSD, it does not have clear "Data Units Written" in SMART attributes.
Power on hours are 15635.
GB Written might be attribute 233: "Media_Wearout_Indicator", which is 61993, which might mean that 62 TB written?
WD's specs says that "up to 400 TBW".
So I guess the wear level is 84% ?
Hmm, 241 is Total_LBAs_Written, 20548.
Where can I find a block size of this disk?
...and it shows Sector size is 512, so I don't understand that LBA number...
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For three years 3.4TB written feels like you don't do much with the machine, that or something is badly out of sort with the tools reporting this. 4TB of write is really low over that time, in fact it's so low its as much of a flag to me as that 150TB number is.
It's unnecessary to go through the trouble of installing Homebrew to get smartmontools installed. Just download the installer package from here: https://www.smartmontools.org/wiki/Download#InstalltheOSXDarwinpackage
The fact that the Surface ANYTHING isn't getting a ton of sales that shows that this removable SSD feature isn't enough for people to jump Apple's ship and buy a Surface.
Not an ad, but there is something called iStat Menu.
Here is mine.
MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018), 2.6 GHz 6-Core Intel Core i7, 16 GB 2400 MHz DDR4, 500 GB SSD
Aw man, I was hoping to get the new 14" MBP when it comes out later this year, but this has me rethinking such a big purchase. Planned obsolescence is never fun.
I really wish Apple went with user replaceable parts in their MBP line, such as replaceable memory, SSDs, and battery. It's not like we're taking our Macs to the beach or the bath. And it would be better for the environment too! Probably more so than removing chargers from iPhone packaging... just my two cents.
I really wish Apple went with user replaceable parts in their MBP line, such as replaceable memory, SSDs, and battery. It's not like we're taking our Macs to the beach or the bath. And it would be better for the environment too! Probably more so than removing chargers from iPhone packaging... just my two cents.
I use SMARTreporter, from appstore.
For external (usb) disks, there's a bit of hassle.
Exactly my logic - I don't understand all the "wait for a second gen version" comments. I replaced my four year old 12" MB with an M1 MBA and it's a fantastic piece of kit in every respect. I also put AC+ on it and if it breaks, it'll get fixed. It's as simple as that.
I do an awful lot with it, but yes, that number seems like a reporting error. It could just be that I use an external drive for the massive files - virtual machines, scanning, large photo manipulation, and such. I use this thing all day, every day. I updated my post when I remembered the second drive, but not soon enough. Really, I was just thinking about OS issues on the older Intel machine. It's on Catalina now but was on Mojave until fairly recently (and boy do I regret the “upgrade.”)
16GB users might have other usage however (video/photo editing)
I am cautious on this rumor and would like to see more deep dive into the issue first... But it wouldn't be unheard of that something like this gets overlooked during design phase...
I'm always a first gen Apple product buyer, they always make it right if there's an issue.
I has a similar observation on my 2020 iMac with 4TB SSD and 64GB of RAM. In just a few week 6 TB were written. Now, after 5 Months I reached 10 TB.
For me the culprits were some processes accessing my Foto App libraries (I have way more than 100.000 images in several libraries). After sone time the numbers went lower.
What really annoys me is, that I do not need some automatic analysis of my images but I can not deactivate it.
For me the culprits were some processes accessing my Foto App libraries (I have way more than 100.000 images in several libraries). After sone time the numbers went lower.
What really annoys me is, that I do not need some automatic analysis of my images but I can not deactivate it.