M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear

[TxLoneRider]

Yep, and they say 8 GB of RAM is enough...

And that is why I splurged on both of my kids Airs (I5 and M1) for the 16G RAM.

And sadly, for my wife's yet to be announced M1X 16" MBP, we will likely get 32G.

 

[thadoggfather]

I have always maintained that computers should be modular so allow for repairability and help costs for consumers.

I am happy the air battery is replaceable. Not all glued together with the logic board and bottom case, like the pros afaik

this is usually the thing that goes

 

[litmag01]

Please link to where you or anyone else predicted this particular, as part of a criticism about the RAM.

Agree, but the general idea is that insufficient RAM can sometimes lead to excessive use of swap disk space on drives. This is particularly painful on non mechanical/magnetic drives.

 

[mi7chy]

Don’t worry. Intel ARE gone!

Same thing was said about PowerPC vs x86-64. Intel can just outsource fab to 7nm/5nm TSMC/Samsung and they're top two again with AMD.

 

[jagan]

Here's a direct link to the SMART Monitoring Tools DMG on Sourceforge:

https://sourceforge.net/projects/sm...montools/7.2/smartmontools-7.2-1.dmg/download

 

[Alwis]

BTW: Is there any clear specification from Apple regarding the endurance of the SSDs.

150 TBW = 3% means, that the total endurance is around 5000 TBW, which seems quite high when comparing to other manufacturer. The highest value from Samsung I could find is e.g. 2400 TBW for a 2 TB drive, most of their models are much lower.

 

[norbinhouston]

Hmmm, well at least with the Mac mini and TB4 you can use an external boot when the internal wears out. Oh wait, we can't do that.

 

[richard371]

FUNNY! the M1 machines are LEMONS!
GO INTEL!

Please no trolling here.

 

[bobbie424242]

"What's on your Mac gets rewritten over and over on your Mac"

 

[swm]

well, i replaced the stock 24Gig SSD with an 1TB WD black edition blade in my 27" intel iMac like 2 months ago. the output reads:

Data Units Read: 10,394,495 [5.32 TB]
Data Units Written: 12,936,932 [6.62 TB]

i don't do I/O heavy stuff, like video editing or handling large files. the mac has however 32gigs of ram.
seeing higher write than read values are nothing new.
oh, one word. i never ever run disk speedtests.

 

[richard371]

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...

Where in the app do you find the total Data Units Written? Doesn't look like the app shows this on the M1.

 

[Suckfest 9001]

My 2014 MacBook Pro looking smug as ever with very low wear on the SSD.

apple has changed

 

[star-affinity]

If people are having their Photos.app Library on the internal drive I'm guessing that could be part of the problem.

I have my Photos Library on an external mechanical hard drive that's relatively noisy when it reads and writes data, and I can tell you the System Agents com.apple.photoanalysisid and com.apple.photolibraryd are causing a lot of hard drive activity for me on a regular basis.

Of course this isn't something you'd notice when the library is on a SSD which is totally quiet when reads and writes takes place.

Not sure if it matters that I have iCloud Photos disabled, but I do.

 

[thewiccaman]

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


View attachment 1734080

M1 MacBook Pro 2 months in, average use:

Am I missing something here?

 

[Sam Squanch]

This is me, standing happily far away from this first gen hardware.

I generally like Apple but it's always been the prevailing wisdom to stay away from their first generation stuff. It tends to have issues. I'm sure when M2 Macs come out they will be amazing.

Not just Apple this applies to almost everything.

I to wait, I'm due for a new computer in the next year and a half I want to transition to Apple silicon Macs because my replacement cycle is about 10 years apart so I want something that will be well supported for a decade. Not saying Intel Macs won't be but all of Apple's language makes me believe that the sooner Apple can phase out Intel the better.

 

[Mr. Dee]

I hope weird issues don't start showing up in the M1 Macs a couple years from now. This is after all first gen product even though 10 years of development went into it.

 

[swm]

and since APFS uses copy-on-write, versioning and snapshots, there'll be lots of write operations

 

[stw]

=== 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:      0

Had this M1 MBP 16GB/512GB for under 2 months

Mine:
Power Cycles: 99
Power On Hours: 201
Running since mid December

Do these numbers make sense?
ViktorEvil: 73h power on but 1941 power cycles in two months?
Me: Realistic numbers: 10-15 power cycles, 1400h power on

 

[Shirasaki]

Apple's next move : smartmontools and other tools can no longer be run on M1 macs.

This could be a reality tho.

 

[NotTooLate]

But we kept hearing that the M1's ram utilization isn't the same as Intel. I've seen people justify 8GB on the M1 is the same as 16 and even 32GB on intel

I dont mind users posting without any technical knowledge on the matter , but mods should know better ...... or at least for some reason I expected it to be the case , the guy posted had a 16GB memory just FYI .... this is NOT an M1 problem , your lack of understanding should not be compensated with snarky replies and winks.

If you can explain why you believe this is an M1 vs Intel issue it will be great !!!
I would save you the trouble , this relates to how those users posting for twitter clicks are using their machines , you can put a 32GB memory and run workloads that will easily need to swap at the same rate , end of the day , if all you do is tax your machine 24/7 and it lasts around a 12-13 years INSIDE the spec , you really shouldnt complain, if you know you are buying the M1 as workstation then go ahead and put more RAM and a larger SSD if you are the SSD wear fearmonger type , i dont expect the machine to break before it gets upgraded (if used as a workstation) , if its a consumer running normal workloads , yes 8GB will be plenty fast and would not break your SSD in the machine life cycle.

Also another FYI , UMA advantage in speed and efficiency is related to how data is being moved between IP`s in the SoC without the need to copy it to their own "memory space" (it actually saves SSD access.....) , it really does have the benefits of better memory utilization , way to go doing a logic jump without understanding the topic in hand.

 

[NintendoRev]

According to iStat my M1 16GB 512GB MBP is at 100% SSD lifetime. Got it end of December.

Same here, 100% with my 16/256 Mini. Beginning of December for me though.

 

[Populus]

I have a quick question. I’ve been trying to run that terminal command on my Mac, but it doesn’t work. I’ve installed DriveDX and this is what I’m getting:

Is that value OK for an SSD that’s been in use for a year? Few months since the last installation. Thank you.

 

[Unregistered 4U]

Sooooooooooooo, you’ve got your malicious code into “brew” but now you need a way to get that out to a LOT of people fast? Have I got an idea for YOU!

 

[techwhiz]

Isn't this exactly what was predicted with inadequate RAM they put in stock models?

Yes.
16GB of memory is not enough and with extra large datasets you can be forced out to swap.
When your storage is SSD using swap is bad. Very bad.

 

[Chompineer]

I have a quick question. I’ve been trying to run that terminal command on my Mac, but it doesn’t work. I’ve installed DriveDX and this is what I’m getting:
View attachment 1734105
Is that value OK for an SSD that’s been in use for a year? Few months since the last installation. Thank you.

That's incredibly low.

Here's the 3 week old 2TB 970 Evo Plus in my desktop. I've already exceeded your total writes.