mac ssd usage

[dontlan]

If you have a m1-m3 mac, please show me the disk load value in active monitoring
For me this figure is 40 GB per day, whether I use mac or not. I have tried reinstalling mac OS, but even a clean system behaves the same way.
I am trying to figure out if this is the norm or not.

these are 1-day figures:

https://skrinshoter.ru/sNiklrsVNE8

https://skrinshoter.ru/sNiTKF9CekU

 

[Bigwaff]

For me this figure is 40 GB per day, whether I use mac or not. I have tried reinstalling mac OS, but even a clean system behaves the same way.
I am trying to figure out if this is the norm or not.

This is the norm. The operating system is constantly writing data to disk .. log entries, caching data, etc... many processes are running in the back ground on your Mac... whether you are doing something or not.

 

[dontlan]

This is the norm. The operating system is constantly writing data to disk .. log entries, caching data, etc... many processes are running in the back ground on your Mac... whether you are doing something or not.

well, as far as I understand, does the system write the cache of applications in order to access them faster? but then why wasn't there such a thing on intel?

 

[Fishrrman]

My solution is very controversial here at macrumors.
It is:
DISABLE VM disk swapping.

That will STOP much of (most of?) the incessant "disk writing".

You DO have to have enough RAM
and
You DO have to take care to manage the RAM you have.

But if you're capable of doing those things, it works great.

 

[Bigwaff]

but then why wasn't there such a thing on intel?

Worked the same way on Intel Macs.

 

[MacCheetah3]

It’s fine.

About 1 day and 30 minutes since last restart (a.k.a. uptime).

Data Read: 112 GB
Data Written: 70 GB

Memory pressure is always green.

You don’t say what your root concern is… But if it’s about SSD wear, you don’t need to worry.

SSD Lifespan: How Long do SSDs Really Last?

Ontrack discusses SSDs, physical faults, malfunctioning controller and storage chips, and hazards of recovering data with data recovery software.

www.ontrack.com

My three year old Mac mini has a total of 17.4 TBW and a calculated 99% lifetime left.

 

[dontlan]

It’s fine.

About 1 day and 30 minutes since last restart (a.k.a. uptime).

Data Read: 112 GB
Data Written: 70 GB

Memory pressure is always green.

You don’t say what your root concern is… But if it’s about SSD wear, you don’t need to worry.

SSD Lifespan: How Long do SSDs Really Last?

Ontrack discusses SSDs, physical faults, malfunctioning controller and storage chips, and hazards of recovering data with data recovery software.

www.ontrack.com

My three year old Mac mini has a total of 17.4 TBW and a calculated 99% lifetime left.

the fact is that my mac mini on m2 has already recorded 3 terabytes in 1 month!

 

[dontlan]

My solution is very controversial here at macrumors.
It is:
DISABLE VM disk swapping.

That will STOP much of (most of?) the incessant "disk writing".

You DO have to have enough RAM
and
You DO have to take care to manage the RAM you have.

But if you're capable of doing those things, it works great.

I have 16 GB of RAM, and it's always green.

what is the risk of disabling virtual machine disk swap?

 

[dontlan]

Worked the same way on Intel Macs.

I've seen intel computers with a disk load of a couple hundred MB per day.

 

[smirking]

I have 16 GB of RAM, and it's always green.

what is the risk of disabling virtual machine disk swap?

He tells everyone to disable swap. Don't do it. MacOS was meant to use some swap. You're fine.

So 3TB in a month? Oh that's very dire. Doing the math, it means you only have around 12 years before you reach your drive's TBW rating.

 

[MacCheetah3]

If we assume your Mac continues to write about 40GB per day:

40 GB multiplied by 365 days equals 14600 GB or 14.6 TB per year
150 TB to use divided by 14.6 TB per year equals 10.27, or at least 10 years of usage.

 

[dontlan]

If we assume your Mac continues to write about 40GB per day:

40 GB multiplied by 365 days equals 14600 GB or 14.6 TB per year
150 TB to use divided by 14.6 TB per year equals 10.27, or at least 10 years of usage.

I'm interested to know what other people's tbw scores are, so I'll figure out if it's a problem or not.

 

[ChrisA]

what is the risk of disabling virtual machine disk swap?

At random times, kernel panics and the computer halts requiring a power cycle.

 

[smirking]

I'm interested to know what other people's tbw scores are, so I'll figure out if it's a problem or not.

Here's mine. 85TB over 24 months. I exceed 3TB/month. I'm a developer and I do a lot of things that require a lot of disk use.

DriveDX rates my SSD at 98% health. I have a 2TB drive though so it's 8x larger than yours. If I had a 256GB drive, I'd be at 80 to 85% health after 2 years.



You should also consider that any one month is not indicative of your overall usage trend, especially when that month is your first month when everyone is likely to be putting more writes to their disk as they get their systems setup.

 

[thebart]

I'm really curious what the heck MacOS is doing that it's writing to disk so much. In less than a year, the m1 mini has written to the boot drive about 3x as much as my Windows PC did in 4?yrs. It didn't much matter with Windows because I could easily clone the drive and replace it. With the Mac that's all she wrote.

I've offloaded my media files and downloads and games and less used apps to an external SSD too.

Edit to add: I think it sucks for Apple to a) charge extortionate rate for storage leading people to buy the smallest drive they can get away with, b) make the computer a doorstop when the internal drive fails, c) be unmindful of how much the OS writes to disk. This company just makes me feel bad for giving it money

 

[MacCheetah3]

I'm really curious what the heck MacOS is doing that it's writing to disk so much. In less than a year, the m1 mini has written to the boot drive about 3x as much as my Windows PC did in 4?yrs.

Usage differences?

My ‘PC’ and Mac mini are only a couple months different in age. I have very little personal information on my Windows machine whereas the Mac is mostly for “typical” usage (e.g., email, web browsing, photos, music). The PC SSD has had ~10.9 TBW thus far — it also has a 2TB drive, so that’s practically nothing for wear.

I think it sucks for Apple to a) charge extortionate rate for storage leading people to buy the smallest drive they can get away with

• I don’t think Apple (including its shareholders) are losing sleep about max profits
• I do agree the markup/premium on upgrades prices are harsh compared to the typical “Apple tax."
• Even if prices were cut in half or more, we shouldn’t encourage (excess) excess. I was using a 1TB drive with my 2012 Mac mini, so I needed to do some ‘house cleaning’ before migrating to this M1 Mac mini. IMO, pushing people to be more efficient is a good thing. With that said, 512GB is still looking tight for my usage, so I will be going for at least a terabyte of primary storage on the next machine.

It didn't much matter with Windows because I could easily clone the drive and replace it. With the Mac that's all she wrote.

b) make the computer a doorstop when the internal drive fails

This concern appears a lot but there’s no evidence it’s justified fear. Can you recall ever reading, hearing, etc about an SSD failure in a Mac, including the Intel models, or an iDevice for that matter — which I have little doubt they rely much more on disk access (e.g., memory swapping) than most Macs? Furthermore, to my recollection, any SSD failure reports have been based on a controller fault or a firmware problem, not NAND wear. I have read about NAND wear failures though only involving endurance testing.

 

[thebart]

Usage differences?

.

PC was my workhorse before switching to Mac. I do pretty much the same things now, except I'm much more mindful about what I put on the internal SSD of the Mac for reasons stated

 

[smirking]

PC was my workhorse before switching to Mac. I do pretty much the same things now, except I'm much more mindful about what I put on the internal SSD of the Mac for reasons stated

Download and run a trial of DriveDX and post the results. Almost everyone who comes in concerned about burning out their SSD has no realistic chance of even coming close even under their own worst case scenarios. Chances are, you don't need to worry.

 

[Ben J.]

I have only one rule; that is to keep plenty of free space on my SSDs. Especially the internal with the swap function. SSDs supposedly works harder and stresses more when close to full, than we saw with spinning HDs.

I agree that the OP's observations should not be of any concern, and that it's how it's meant to work, with the processor, memory and internal drive tightly integrated as they are on new macs.

I have 400GB written, and 160 read. That's since I restarted, maybe last week. Mostly Firefox, also launchdeamon, kerneltask and mds processes.

 

[MBAir2010]

I wake up
70GB free!
go to sleep
54GB free
wake up
delete watched TV shows, a movie prob 5GB
restart
70GB free!

I missed the boat on all this "disk load value in active monitoring" and other M chip "image" something.
do I need to learn this?
I rather not
and simply enjoy life and save a brain cell or two.

thanks!

 

[Ben J.]

I missed the boat on all this "disk load value in active monitoring" and other M chip "image" something.
do I need to learn this?

I think they meant the Activity Monitor app. Applications/Utilities/.
Shows you all the basic things going on on your mac.

 

[dontlan]

Usage differences?

My ‘PC’ and Mac mini are only a couple months different in age. I have very little personal information on my Windows machine whereas the Mac is mostly for “typical” usage (e.g., email, web browsing, photos, music). The PC SSD has had ~10.9 TBW thus far — it also has a 2TB drive, so that’s practically nothing for wear.


• I don’t think Apple (including its shareholders) are losing sleep about max profits
• I do agree the markup/premium on upgrades prices are harsh compared to the typical “Apple tax."
• Even if prices were cut in half or more, we shouldn’t encourage (excess) excess. I was using a 1TB drive with my 2012 Mac mini, so I needed to do some ‘house cleaning’ before migrating to this M1 Mac mini. IMO, pushing people to be more efficient is a good thing. With that said, 512GB is still looking tight for my usage, so I will be going for at least a terabyte of primary storage on the next machine.



This concern appears a lot but there’s no evidence it’s justified fear. Can you recall ever reading, hearing, etc about an SSD failure in a Mac, including the Intel models, or an iDevice for that matter — which I have little doubt they rely much more on disk access (e.g., memory swapping) than most Macs? Furthermore, to my recollection, any SSD failure reports have been based on a controller fault or a firmware problem, not NAND wear. I have read about NAND wear failures though only involving endurance testing.

macOS loaded 200 GB onto my disk in 1 day. I only recorded and deleted (movies) on my EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE, but when I opened drivedx, I saw 3.3 terabytes, even though it was 3.1 yesterday.

It's possible that when I delete, I move files from my HDD to the trash, so it goes to the SSD on the Mac?

 

[jdb8167]

macOS loaded 200 GB onto my disk in 1 day. I only recorded and deleted (movies) on my EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE, but when I opened drivedx, I saw 3.3 terabytes, even though it was 3.1 yesterday.

It's possible that when I delete, I move files from my HDD to the trash, so it goes to the SSD on the Mac?

Even at 200 GB per day, that is only 73 TBW per year. At that rate the total lifetime will still be 20 years at 1500 TBW which is a guesstimate of the lifespan of an Apple 256 GB SSD. Longer TBWs with larger SSDs.

 

[dontlan]

Even at 200 GB per day, that is only 73 TBW per year. At that rate the total lifetime will still be 20 years at 1500 TBW which is a guesstimate of the lifespan of an Apple 256 GB SSD. Longer TBWs with larger SSDs.

Where did you get such data?

I recently saw the results of one user on reddit, and they surprised me.

at 620 terabytes, the disk health percentage is 57 percent.
Samsung disks were tested, and there the memory capacity was 4000-7000 terabytes for the 250 GB version, why couldn't Apple make the same reliable disks?

 

[dontlan]

Even at 200 GB per day, that is only 73 TBW per year. At that rate the total lifetime will still be 20 years at 1500 TBW which is a guesstimate of the lifespan of an Apple 256 GB SSD. Longer TBWs with larger SSDs.

are there any apple ssd tests?
Are you saying this based on personal experience