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M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear

M1 MBP 512GB 8GB since the end of November.

No Adobe apps. Moderate sized photo library, moderate Music library, only really do web, office, email and gaming (Civ6 and Shadow of the Tomb Raider). Steam apps held on an external SSD.

SSD Life.png

*Shrugs*
 
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As I wanted to monitor SSD writes I made a small python script several years ago, which read the values calculates TBW from MiBs and stores these values in a SQLite Database. I run the script every few month.

After using it for some time my intel iMac now averages to around 50GB/day of data written. And I do not use many large files like videos. I do photo editing with C1, software development and the usual office and internet stuff. Usage of the iMac currently is around 4-12h a day.

Think it's time for us to breakdown what programs/apps are causing all the writes?
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When checking the data written in activity monitor one of the main culprits was photoanalysisd, which reached 100 GB shortly after restarting the iMac.

it's mainly reading your library to analyse content (find faces and scenes).
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Somehow it writes massive amount of data to, maybe some temporary files.
 
2018 Mac mini i7 with 32 GB of ram and 256 GB SSD that has been used light to moderate since August 2019.
Percentage Used: 2%
Data Units Written: 25,011,466 [12.8 TB]

2018 MacBook Pro 15" with 32GB of ram and 512 GB SSD that has been used moderately since Sept 2018
Percentage Used: 1%
Data Units Written: 31,756,924 [16.2 TB]

I'll have to check some of the other new Macs, especially anything with 8GB of ram and see what their SSD usage is like.
 
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For the first person who had 1% after 2 months, given rounding for that percentage point (i.e. 0.5-1.5%), that's between 6 and 33 years of life. Probably not something to worry.

For the person with 3%, there are 144 power cycles in 2 months... What are they doing? That's 2-3 power cycles a day...!
 
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theluggage said:
Still, this is why SSDs should never, ever be soldered in to any remotely "pro" machine - although its pretty standard practice with the sort of ultra-portable laptops that are the real alternatives to the Air and low-end MBP.
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In the PC world, every business machine I've encountered so far RAM, SSD, DVD can be swapped out. Most can be done with minimal/no tools and under 2 minutes. Sure business class PC's are ugly as sin, but when down time = lost revenue you understand why Macs never made much of a dent in enterprise space.
 
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NotTooLate said:
Future proofing is marketing speak , if the baseline for the M1 machines came in at 16GB , would you go for 32 ? Just because 16 is the bare minimum they sell?
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For a computer that is impossible to upgrade in the future? Absolutely.
 
Mousse said:
In the PC world, every business machine I've encountered so far RAM, SSD, DVD can be swapped out. Most can be done with minimal/no tools and under 2 minutes. Sure business class PC's are ugly as sin, but when down time = lost revenue you understand why Macs never made much of a dent in enterprise space.
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But then you'll get all the people who complain how thick & heavy it is, too. There's no winning in this situation.
 
I've got the lowest of the low MacBook Air M1; I did get it open-box from Best Buy in January, but I don't think it was ever used.

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 31 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 0%
Data Units Read: 3,103,856 [1.58 TB]
Data Units Written: 1,847,485 [945 GB]
Host Read Commands: 47,923,856
Host Write Commands: 34,079,220
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 180
Power On Hours: 34
Unsafe Shutdowns: 7
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
 
guzhogi said:
But then you'll get all the people who complain how thick & heavy it is, too. There's no winning in this situation.
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Sure there is. Don't solder every thing onto the MB. They don't have to make everything easily to switch out, but make it so that it CAN be switched out/upgraded. We had that in the past before the your Mac can never be too thin mantra. This is an absolute must in the Pro market. Look at how badly the can Mac Pro bombed and how many pros longed for a pro machine in the same vein as the G5 Cheese Grater. We had that in the past before the your Mac can never be too thin mantra.
 
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Zadigre said:
it's mainly reading your library to analyse content (find faces and scenes).

My Photos Library is on my SSD on both my MacBook Air M1 and 2018 Mac mini (intel)... and health is excellent on both... 100% on MBA and 98% on Mac mini.
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Thanks, I know it's doing that. What I think is a bit strange is that it has to do it so often. I take a bunch of photos a day on average, but not that many and still it's chewing like crazy pretty often.

But good if your SSD's stay in shape even if the Photos Library is on those drives. :)
 
ZipZilla said:
This is exactly why I never buy the first version of an Apple product. People wind up being guinea pigs and beta testers. Expensive!
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What do you expect to be changed? You know next series will include similar soc with higher capacity and performance. If it is a software issue, then it can be solved now.
 
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For me, once i start Adobe Lightroom (the CC M1 version or Rosetta "Classic" version) my kernel task goes to 1 TB of swap writes fast. This is just with Lightroom opened while browsing photos.

Again, both the App store CC version of Lightroom and the Classic versions are impacted by this.

My intel hackintosh is not impacted by this. Both machines are on clean installs of 11.2.1 and latest app store Lightroom.
 
CrushRoller said:
Clever move to solder the SSD on board... If it also wears fast, Apple will get a lot of money from service... 🤣
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Wouldn't it have to wear out after exactly a year? Otherwise apple would lose a ton of money having to replace complete boards under warranty.
 
I can't help but laugh at all this...

All those people running benchmarks out the yahoo trying to push the machine to the limits now to be told... the machine has limits... gasp!

Remember folks, none of you will likely be using this machine in 5 years, hell I'd be willing to bet less than 2 years. You're going to buy the next machine that they put out anyways... it was an impulse buy remember?

So, who here has actually worn out an SSD drive to date. Come on, ante up... surely someone here has actually done it. You can't count the licks to the center of a tootsie roll pop if you never started counting. I'm willing to bet the number of failed SSD drives is right on par with HDD drives over time. Always a percentage of early fails but the majority last longer than you normally own the device.
 
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