The YouTube video from Max Tech noted that a number of apps could be causing the excessive writes--maybe!
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M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear
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I don't buy this as an excuse when there are profit margins being made in the 15%+. the min-maxing at the expense of the consumers experience for a few meesily percentage points of profit is not a suitable trade off.
Simple fact o the matter. Devices as small as ultrabooks used to have sockets and SODIMM slots and still fit within those constraints, without serious impact to profits or user experience.
The move to complete soldered down is absolutely a consumer hostile move with the motive of pure min/max of profit and steering future growth by disposable products.
we should be all saying "Enough"... but alass, we then have comments like yours giving corporations the benefit of the doubt because "profit"
That 15%+ is likely gross profit and not net profit. Net profit in the PC industry is notoriously thin which is why on the PC side the Windows machine's drive is filled to the brim with ad/spam ware.
The command line smartmontools is native M1 but even if it was Rosetta 2, it is reading data from the OS and unless the OS is misreporting, even Rosetta 2 translation should still be correct.
Yes, But on Apple side, they have some decent margins. it's why their price points are typically much higher than other competition.
and it's also noticable that lower end laptops with the smaller margins tend not to be soldered down either. it's generally overall cheaper to make one logic board that fits more products and then socket in the CPU/RAM to fit. having to do what the current trend does of direct solder isn't actually cheaper for companies that have multiple SkU's.
In Apple's case, they have to have a line that can be adaptable to the different product SKU's. So while the costs likely up front aren't going to be much different between the soldered vs nonsoldered. What Soldered gives them is guaranteed upgrade paths for users. It's something they learned with the earyl 10s MacBook pros that all had socketable RAM and replaceable hard drives. People held on to them for years longer than the estimated 3-5 year turn around. RAM and SSD upgrades easily extended the life of these devices by years. That meants less NEW product sales at a regular interval
Right now. ESPECIALLY since the T2 chip's invention. If a single issue occurs on the logic board, and the product is out of warranty, Apple's recommended fix is to buy a whole new computer. OR replace in it's entirety the circuit board. If we look at the issue in this thread, it means that once a SSD hits wear down point, possibly ahead of the rest of the machines life, that now the entire machine will still need to be replaced. YEARS before it's possible truly dead.
We all need to start telling companies like Apple and other premium laptop makers who are doing the same thing, that enough is enough.
Well yes and no. I recently built a new desktop for myself. Having said that, if one of the memory sticks go bad, the video card goes bad, the cpu goes south...I may be able to diagnose the issue and replace affected part. But if the integrated ethernet chip, wifi chip, pci controller, etc goes bad, how is that supposed to be diagnosed and fixed? The only remedy is a new system board, but I'm on my own on that. And sure the system board is warrantied for a year, but I lose the use of the system while I remove the system board and send it back.
It's a no-win situation as I see it.
Desktops have done similar. I'm not super happy either. I have had a Audio controller die on a high end motherboard that resulted in a costly replacement.
However, it's more just mitigating and identifying what is a likely part that would need to be replaced. Audio controllers dying is super rare and can often be mitigated via USB audio adapter until the motherboard is replaced.
But to compare that to a device that is 100% soldered: Lets say an Audio controller does die. Pull my hard drive, cpu and ram off that motherboard. Swap in a new motherboard. Put back in my RAM, CPU and Hard drive. And I'm back up in running in the time that it took me to get that new motherboard. Zero data loss.
With current soldered Storage in particular. And especially with Apples T2 chip, This is not happening. You have lost your data. (Better have backups. RIGHT EVERYONE?). You are now out of working until they replace everything or you buy a full new computer. new RAM, new board, new everything. it's definintely not the most economical solution.
In my above though: I don't say and do support that there are legitimate times and places for soldered stuff. We have seen that there's really no way to make a phone the size they are and keep modularity for example. Project Aria proved that.
But when it comes to laptops, the move was mainly a cost saving for the company, while creating a more disposable consumerist facing product that is easier to just throw out and replace than perform basic maintenance on.
As a hobbies system builder, I usually have spare Motherboards for example. so in my case, the swap time was literally minutes of outage. And for many of us hobbiests, we have our local computer part maker on call and can usually have a replacement in within an hour or two. again, not something capable when you're dealing with a complete system on board.
Although I do dread having to swap any parts on my recent build... Did my first ever custom water loop in a mATX case and it is not the most convenient to get to the motherboard. Going to be getting a new Gen 4 SSD shortly so... looking forward to that lol
I highly doubt that there are large corporations having conference call meetings getting ready to throw the switch on “repairable” systems when one person goes “WAIT!!!! I’ve just seen this post on MacRumors that gives us the benefit of the doubt! We can stop now!”
Then, everyone breathes a sign of relief and ends the call.
What’s MORE likely is
“Will soldering hamper our sales?
No, not by any significant amount. Our numbers say that 99.99999% of folks never even open their systems from the time they’re purchased to the time they get their next one.
So, we can save costs and materials by not offering a thing that people don’t want? Good, the money embedded in the sidewall of my pool needs to be resurfaced… with more money.”
Okay valid point. But everyone does back up their data in event of a catastrophe? Correct?
Custom water loop? Nice.
Right. The majority of people don't upgrade their machine or have the patients to play around with the settings if they are inclined to upgrade. Heck banks are still holding on to PCs (as ATMs) that can't be upgraded even though they are stuck using an OS 12 years old (Windows XP)
Computer companies don't want that. They want people to upgrade the whole machine as often as is possible and limiting upgrade options is the best way to do that.
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Yes, it’s always the 2nd hand buyer that pays the price.
this is why there’s a delay in resale value.
I have been watching the activity monitor the last couple of weeks on my 16GB M1 Mini. Most of the time there's no excessive writing to ssd until I start using Adobe Lightroom Classic and Photoshop + making backups with Timemachine. That can easily write hundreds of gigabytes in a short period of time.
Unless the Time Machine writes are to the disk the system boots from, don't worry about those writes. As for Adobe I think they hadn't been optimized for M1 yet.
It’s exactly these apps which are still concerning me with this issue.
Which versions are you running, please?
Photoshop is native M1 now. I believe LR CC is also (?) but not LR Classic yet...
I do not agree. I have an old Mac Mini that can still run Big Sur, and is. But the hard drive (non-SSD, so you can HEAR when it's busy) is constantly griding, like the spotlight function has never stopped or logging is going crazy.
I open up console.app to see that logging IS going crazy. Maybe it doesn't all write to the disk immeditely, or at all, but something is very busy grinding away on that poor HDD. The number of ridiculous error messages FROM APPLES OWN PRODUCTS in the console log is astounding and rather pathetic for an OS at this stage.
It's been bad but not quite like early Big Sur.
Latest update does seem to have calmned down some of the nonsense. I'm not quite sure I'd call it fixed.
I mean, Apple is getting ready to launch the next update, and that’s been less than two months. Were you expecting monthly updates of a non-security nature? Microsoft’s monthly patches are mostly for security reasons, and Linux desktop distros do have faster updates, but they’re usually less stable (with enterprise users being on a slower update cycle than desktop users, similar to Windows, actually).
Hi here!
I know I'm just a new user, but I just bought a MacBook Air M1 8GB/256GB a few hours ago, and I may have found a solution that I didn't see online yet.
So, when I set up the laptop, I realized that my username wasn't the one I like (mainly because I try to have the same across computers) after monitoring via "Activity Monitor" that just by playing a Youtube video, my SSD writes were going up like CRAZY (2GB in 10s). I have this recorded because I was showing that to a friend criticizing my purchase.
So, impulsed by my OCD, I afterwards proceeded to create a new account as Admin, reboot the PC and log in to the new account. I decided to set up Touch ID, but deny Siri, to connect the account to an Apple ID, and disable all location options.
Aaand... Right now I'm playing a 4k60fps video in the background, with Adguard running (because I heard that videos are the most problematic) and having Asphalt 9 opened (because why not) while writing this post... And the write rate is 1.6.KB/s! It just wrote 1 extra GB this last hour, and 30 extra megabytes (0.03GB) since the beginning of this post.
Sorry that I didn't do more tests with the first account that was set up with the computer, but I didn't expect this to be fixed by changing users (in my case). I hope that, if someone tries this, also helps them.
The two smartctl reports that I did with the new account:
I know I'm just a new user, but I just bought a MacBook Air M1 8GB/256GB a few hours ago, and I may have found a solution that I didn't see online yet.
So, when I set up the laptop, I realized that my username wasn't the one I like (mainly because I try to have the same across computers) after monitoring via "Activity Monitor" that just by playing a Youtube video, my SSD writes were going up like CRAZY (2GB in 10s). I have this recorded because I was showing that to a friend criticizing my purchase.
So, impulsed by my OCD, I afterwards proceeded to create a new account as Admin, reboot the PC and log in to the new account. I decided to set up Touch ID, but deny Siri, to connect the account to an Apple ID, and disable all location options.
Aaand... Right now I'm playing a 4k60fps video in the background, with Adguard running (because I heard that videos are the most problematic) and having Asphalt 9 opened (because why not) while writing this post... And the write rate is 1.6.KB/s! It just wrote 1 extra GB this last hour, and 30 extra megabytes (0.03GB) since the beginning of this post.
Sorry that I didn't do more tests with the first account that was set up with the computer, but I didn't expect this to be fixed by changing users (in my case). I hope that, if someone tries this, also helps them.
The two smartctl reports that I did with the new account:
Code:
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Number: APPLE SSD AP0256Q
Serial Number: [REDACTED]
Firmware Version: [REDACTED]
PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID: [REDACTED]
IEEE OUI Identifier: [REDACTED]
Controller ID: 0
NVMe Version: <1.2
Number of Namespaces: 3
Local Time is: Sat Apr 24 22:35:23 2021 CEST
Firmware Updates (0x02): 1 Slot
Optional Admin Commands (0x0004): Frmw_DL
Optional NVM Commands (0x0004): DS_Mngmt
Maximum Data Transfer Size: 256 Pages
Supported Power States
St Op Max Active Idle RL RT WL WT Ent_Lat Ex_Lat
0 + 0.00W - - 0 0 0 0 0 0
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 30 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 0%
Data Units Read: 303,698 [155 GB]
Data Units Written: 226,302 [115 GB]
Host Read Commands: 4,774,741
Host Write Commands: 2,284,781
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 76
Power On Hours: 2
Unsafe Shutdowns: 3
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
Read 1 entries from Error Information Log failed: GetLogPage failed: system=0x38, sub=0x0, code=745
Code:
=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Number: APPLE SSD AP0256Q
Serial Number: [REDACTED]
Firmware Version: [REDACTED]
PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID: [REDACTED]
IEEE OUI Identifier: [REDACTED]
Controller ID: 0
NVMe Version: <1.2
Number of Namespaces: 3
Local Time is: Sat Apr 24 23:51:32 2021 CEST
Firmware Updates (0x02): 1 Slot
Optional Admin Commands (0x0004): Frmw_DL
Optional NVM Commands (0x0004): DS_Mngmt
Maximum Data Transfer Size: 256 Pages
Supported Power States
St Op Max Active Idle RL RT WL WT Ent_Lat Ex_Lat
0 + 0.00W - - 0 0 0 0 0 0
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 29 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 0%
Data Units Read: 314,381 [160 GB]
Data Units Written: 227,898 [116 GB]
Host Read Commands: 4,907,769
Host Write Commands: 2,320,421
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 76
Power On Hours: 2
Unsafe Shutdowns: 3
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
Read 1 entries from Error Information Log failed: GetLogPage failed: system=0x38, sub=0x0, code=745From what I have seen it isn't that easy. The biggest hurdle is finding out what combination of factors is causing the problem because not everybody is seeing excessive writes. The ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written thread has shown values all over the place.
For example, one person reported 1.03 TB for 8 hr in a month and another reported 4.3 TBW over 5 months (0.86 TB per month). When put in the context of The SSD Endurance Experiment: They’re all dead a linear progression is perfectly reasonable and taking the 600 TBW a bank using an M1 as a postgres server got (and there is something wonky about the numbers) that works about to 50 years for the first and 68 years for the second.
Then you have the user who came to the conclusion "Apple has the base model SSD (256MB) rated at 1.6PB" Conversely the worst number a person gave came out at 6 years. That level of variance is nuts.
Some people have pointed ot Abode's Lightroom or Chrome as a cause (both out of Apple's control) while others have pointed to Safari (which is an Apple issue). The reality is no one (likely even Apple) has any idea what is causing the write issue.
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This is a serious problem. My M1 MBP 8/256 using fairly standard business apps has used 21% of SSD life in 5 months writing 258TB to disk. This means the SSD will die at just under 2 years which is unacceptable. Apple is going to have huge warranty problems.