SSD health: One big SSD or multiple smaller ones?

[Silly John Fatty]

I was going to order the new Mac Mini M2 Pro with 4 TB storage, but then I got doubts and had to re-think if I wouldn't rather order the 8 TB model. Both models are available refurbished from Apple, so they're much cheaper than new, but the price difference between the two is still big.

Money isn't really an object here however, because my plan is to get external storage that can keep up with the Mini's internal SSD read & write speeds, which in this case means getting NVME SSDs, a suited enclosure, cables, etc. etc.

All in all there's no real price difference. The 8 TB Mini will cost around 1000 Euros more than the 4 TB model, but so does the external storage with everything around it.

So my decision is now revolving around SSD health. I'm not familiar with how the technology works, but my goal is to keep the computer for the next 10 years, if possible.

Would you recommend having one single big (in this case 8 TB) SSD, or rather take the 4 TB one and then have additional external SSDs? It's really all about SSD health and keeping those SSDs as fresh as possible, for as long as possible.

Thanks community!

 

[jz0309]

I was going to order the new Mac Mini M2 Pro with 4 TB storage, but then I got doubts and had to re-think if I wouldn't rather order the 8 TB model. Both models are available refurbished from Apple, so they're much cheaper than new, but the price difference between the two is still big.

Money isn't really an object here however, because my plan is to get external storage that can keep up with the Mini's internal SSD read & write speeds, which in this case means getting NVME SSDs, a suited enclosure, cables, etc. etc.

All in all there's no real price difference. The 8 TB Mini will cost around 1000 Euros more than the 4 TB model, but so does the external storage with everything around it.

So my decision is now revolving around SSD health. I'm not familiar with how the technology works, but my goal is to keep the computer for the next 10 years, if possible.

Would you recommend having one single big (in this case 8 TB) SSD, or rather take the 4 TB one and then have additional external SSDs? It's really all about SSD health and keeping those SSDs as fresh as possible, for as long as possible.

Thanks community!

never heard that the size of a SSD has an impact on its health/life.
one could argue that having all eggs in 1 basket is a higher risk in case of failure, but, make sure you have a solid backup strategy!

 

[MacCheetah3]

Basically, the bigger the better — though it is still very possible to over spec.*

• The more free space on the drive, the easier it is for the controller to perform wear leveling
- And more blocks to have as spares
• Having everything (or almost everything) on a single drive makes things convenient, including backups.

Everything You Need To Know About SSD Wear & Tear

In what seems like a very sudden move, SSD technology has gone mainstream. These fast, solid-state drives are a common feature on even mid-range computers. Even the next generation of Playstation will feature an SSD instead of a more traditional hard drive. In general this is a good thing. SSDs...

helpdeskgeek.com

What Is SSD Wear Leveling and How Does It Work?

Is wear leveling good for your SSD?

www.makeuseof.com

Exceptions:

Certain tasks are very disk intensive, such as video and image editing. For these workloads, pros will opt for a “scratch disk” — basically, a disk known to be subjected to a lot of wear and tear and considered disposable.

Working with scratch disks

Learn about the scratch files and disk usage in Adobe Premiere Elements.

helpx.adobe.com

Set up scratch disks

Learn how to set up and manage scratch disks in Photoshop.

helpx.adobe.com

Ultimately, in these situations:

This setup will give you the best performance, while also isolating high-stress cache files onto their own drive so that if they cause the drive to fail prematurely, all you lose is temporary data that your applications can easily regenerate as needed.

Understanding Storage for Video Editing

Processors and video card may be the most discussed hardware when designing a video editing workstation, but the type and configuration of your local storage drives is also a very important consideration. Not only can a proper storage setup help your workstation perform at its best, but it can...

www.pugetsystems.com

 

[Silly John Fatty]

never heard that the size of a SSD has an impact on its health/life.
one could argue that having all eggs in 1 basket is a higher risk in case of failure, but, make sure you have a solid backup strategy!

That’s good to hear, I wasn’t sure!

Basically, the bigger the better — that’s not to say it’s impossible to over spec.

• The more free space on the drive, the easier it is for the controller to perform wear leveling
- And more blocks to have as spares
• Having everything (or almost everything) on a single drive makes things convenient, including backups.

Everything You Need To Know About SSD Wear & Tear

In what seems like a very sudden move, SSD technology has gone mainstream. These fast, solid-state drives are a common feature on even mid-range computers. Even the next generation of Playstation will feature an SSD instead of a more traditional hard drive. In general this is a good thing. SSDs...

helpdeskgeek.com

What Is SSD Wear Leveling and How Does It Work?

Is wear leveling good for your SSD?

www.makeuseof.com

Exceptions:

Certain tasks are very disk intensive, such as video and image editing. For these workloads, pros will opt for a “scratch disk” — basically, a disk known to be subjected to a lot of wear and tear and considered disposable.

Working with scratch disks

Learn about the scratch files and disk usage in Adobe Premiere Elements.

helpx.adobe.com

Set up scratch disks

Learn how to set up and manage scratch disks in Photoshop.

helpx.adobe.com

Ultimately, in these situations:

Understanding Storage for Video Editing

Processors and video card may be the most discussed hardware when designing a video editing workstation, but the type and configuration of your local storage drives is also a very important consideration. Not only can a proper storage setup help your workstation perform at its best, but it can...

www.pugetsystems.com

Thanks so much, that definitely helped me!

 

[Silly John Fatty]

I noticed that a lot of people recommend turning TRIM off for SSD health.

I've concluded so far:

• Having TRIM enabled is better for speed
• But disabling TRIM is better for the health and lifespan of the SSD

It seems like you have to make a choice as to which of both is more important to you. And it seems like you can't have both.

Would you guys agree with this?

 

[RokinAmerica]

I have used SSD's for well over 10 years. Trim should be used. I have not had a single SSD die on me while being used (2 of 12 from years ago no longer work after sitting on a shelf for many years).

Regardless of the size of drive you choose, you need a consistent backup strategy. There is no such thing as a fail proof drive. Any drive could die at any time.

Unless you need the space, do not overpay for unneeded space.

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Trim should be used.

That was my thought as well, that's why I was surprised so many articles recommend to turn it off to avoid SSD wear (the problem with new Macs is the SSDs are soldered …).

I also agree on the rest you wrote.

 

[chown33]

That was my thought as well, that's why I was surprised so many articles recommend to turn it off to avoid SSD wear (the problem with new Macs is the SSDs are soldered …).

Please link to some of the articles saying TRIM should be disabled. This doesn't seem credible to me. I'm pretty sure that disabling TRIM will be worse for cell lifetime.

Trim (computing) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

... Since an erase of the cells in the page is needed before it can be written to again, but only entire blocks can be erased, an overwrite will initiate a read-erase-modify-write cycle:[7][12] the contents of the entire block are stored in cache, then the entire block is erased from the SSD, then the overwritten page(s) is written into the cached block, and only then can the entire updated block be written to the flash medium. This phenomenon is known as write amplification.[13][14]

The "write amplification" link provides a more detailed explanation and diagrams.

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Please link to some of the articles saying TRIM should be disabled. This doesn't seem credible to me. I'm pretty sure that disabling TRIM will be worse for cell lifetime.

Trim (computing) - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

The "write amplification" link provides a more detailed explanation and diagrams.

Just did a quick Google search and already stumbled across this:

How to Prevent Excessive Wear on Mac SSDs?

Modern SSDs are meant to be durable. Yet, they are prone to issues due to excessive wear caused by repeat

www.stellarinfo.com

How to Prevent Excessive SSD Wear & Extend SSD's Lifespan?

A guide to prevent the excessive SSD usage happening or becoming worse. And how to extend the lifespan of the SSD on an M1 Mac.

iboysoft.com

How to prevent M1 Mac excessive SSD wear

No one wants to encounter M1 SSD wear. I’ve fetched everything you need to know to avoid this frustrating issue.

cleanmymac.com

Some also say the opposite, to enable TRIM. That makes me wonder if people know what they're talking about in the first place, or if they're just repeating what they've heard/read somewhere else.

 

[KaliYoni]

Please link to some of the articles saying TRIM should be disabled.

That makes me wonder if people know what they're talking about in the first place, or if they're just repeating what they've heard/read somewhere else.

Whenever I want to learn about the inner workings of macOS, I turn to The Eclectic Light Company. Many Mac troubleshooting sites and developers recommend the site. I regard ELC to more credible and better informed than YouTube videos and social media posts from "influencers".

Here is a recent article that discusses TRIM on Macs:

Should you trim external SSDs?

Enabling the TRIM command was once thought important to maintain good write performance on SSDs. What has happened to it? Should we still be enabling it?

eclecticlight.co

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Whenever I want to learn about the inner workings of macOS, I turn to The Eclectic Light Company. Many Mac troubleshooting sites and developers recommend the site. I regard ELC to more credible and better informed than YouTube videos and social media posts from "influencers".

Here is a recent article that discusses TRIM on Macs:

Should you trim external SSDs?

Enabling the TRIM command was once thought important to maintain good write performance on SSDs. What has happened to it? Should we still be enabling it?

eclecticlight.co

Thanks, will put this website to the side.

Interesting, so Trim isn't even really a thing anymore. I guess Apple knows what they do and I wouldn't be surprised if theres no need to fiddle with anything.

 

[Basic75]

never heard that the size of a SSD has an impact on its health/life

Size can impact life time in that a larger drive can handle more data being written to it. Of course if you write twice as much data to a twice as large drive then you won't gain anything.

 

[Basic75]

Please link to some of the articles saying TRIM should be disabled. This doesn't seem credible to me. I'm pretty sure that disabling TRIM will be worse for cell lifetime.

Of course disabling TRIM is a bad idea. TRIM tells the drive which data is garbage so the wear levelling doesn't have to copy dead data around all the time.

People parroting "TRIM is superfluous with garbage collection" don't understand that TRIM is one of only two ways how the drive knows which data is garbage!

 

[Basic75]

Trim isn't even really a thing anymore

Of course it's still a thing. Just because modern drives perform reasonably well without TRIM doesn't mean that they won't perform better, and, more importantly, live longer, with TRIM enabled.

 

[Basic75]

• But disabling TRIM is better for the health and lifespan of the SSD

What, no! The opposite! Do you actually understand what TRIM does?

 

[MacCheetah3]

Unless you need the space, do not overpay for unneeded space.

Because I feel this was directed at my comment, I’ll address it.

Basically, the bigger the better — that’s not to say it is possible to over spec.

Foremost, if a person tidies up, it may be surprised on how much storage space can be regained.

• Outdated/irrelevant documents
• Incompatible/irrelevant applications and their support files
• Outdated/irrelevant messages, deleting or archiving
— Using the “Save to PDF” function in the printing subsystem can vastly help in organization — using Mail or Messages for long archiving is a poor practice.

With that said...

Photos, music, and video (movies or not) accumulate and aren’t often a reasonable target for deletion. How much and quickly varies greatly by case/person.

Ultimately, my general rule is to strongly consider the next tier. For example, if your device has 638GB of data, go for the 2TB storage space when upgrading (including next device purchase). Of course, if your data would increase to 940GB, for example, staying at the 2TB capacity would still be reasonable.

 

[ojfd]

never heard that the size of a SSD has an impact on its health/life.

The size of the drive has direct relation to the number of bytes that can be written to it.
So, on one hand, all else being equal, the larger the drive, the longer the data could be written to it before all cells are exhausted.
On the other hand, if the controller or any of the flash memory chips decide to go south, your drive will be toast, no matter how big it is.
Also, larger drive will contain more flash memory chips than small one, so chances that something could go wrong are multiplied by 2/4/8 etc.

The reliability/longevity of current Apple products is still unknown. Only time will tell.


I'm still on oldish MBP, but here's my story:
After my main 1/2 year old Crucial 500GB drive died unexpectedly on me 3 years ago and took very valuable data with it (I had no backup at a time), I've swithched to multiple 250GB drives for main tasks and keep everything else on external FireWire/Thunderbolt drives + multiple backups.

 

[HDFan]

Would you recommend having one single big (in this case 8 TB) SSD, or rather take the 4 TB one

Another thing to consider is SSD speed. Larger SSDs often have more chips which can mean greater speed. Haven't seen any definitive speed tests, but here is one which might indicate you can get 3x faster with a 4 TB compared with 256. Maybe closer to 8000 with an 8 TB SSD which I almost get with my Studio.

https://www.reddit.com/r/macmini/comments/10kqjwd

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Of course it's still a thing. Just because modern drives perform reasonably well without TRIM doesn't mean that they won't perform better, and, more importantly, live longer, with TRIM enabled.

From what I understood from the article posted earlier, either new drives aren't using TRIM anymore because they use other things to do what they need to do, or TRIM is only a part of multiple other features that complement each other.

I suppose the best thing to do, at least on a brand new Mac, is to not change anything. Apple probably knows what they did and why they did it. Better than us at least, lol.

Another thing to consider is SSD speed. Larger SSDs often have more chips which can mean greater speed. Haven't seen any definitive speed tests, but here is one which might indicate you can get 3x faster with a 4 TB compared with 256. Maybe closer to 8000 with an 8 TB SSD which I almost get with my Studio.

https://www.reddit.com/r/macmini/comments/10kqjwd

I've only seen what other people have posted in terms of read & write speeds they could achieve, and apparently, from 1 TB onwards (at least for the current Mac Mini), there's no speed differences anymore. Someone explained why, it's because of hardware that the 1 TB+ models have that the models with less storage don't have.

I got myself the 4 TB model now. Almost got the 8 TB model but it was too expensive and when I found out I could get same as internal speeds over Thunderbolt, I told myself I'd store the rest externally. I also thought it was better to have multiple drives (internal + externals) instead of only one (internal only).

Do you have a Studio with 8 TB?

 

[MacCheetah3]

Another thing to consider is SSD speed. Larger SSDs often have more chips which can mean greater speed. Haven't seen any definitive speed tests, but here is one which might indicate you can get 3x faster with a 4 TB compared with 256. Maybe closer to 8000 with an 8 TB SSD which I almost get with my Studio.

https://www.reddit.com/r/macmini/comments/10kqjwd

Appears on par:

 

[Basic75]

From what I understood from the article posted earlier, either new drives aren't using TRIM anymore because they use other things to do what they need to do, or TRIM is only a part of multiple other features that complement each other.

Nothing can replace TRIM short of the SSD understanding the filesystem. Do you even understand what TRIM does? What feature do you think is doing the same thing and how?

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Do you even understand what TRIM does?

Umm, do you even lift?

I was referring to this article @KaliYoni posted by the way: https://eclecticlight.co/2023/03/25/should-you-trim-external-ssds/ Not sure which features it was exactly that does the same as TRIM. At some point they say DEALLOCATE is the closest substitute to TRIM and that the latter apparently doesn't even exist anymore.

 

[Basic75]

I was referring to this article @KaliYoni posted by the way: https://eclecticlight.co/2023/03/25/should-you-trim-external-ssds/ Not sure which features it was exactly that does the same as TRIM. At some point they say DEALLOCATE is the closest substitute to TRIM and that the latter apparently doesn't even exist anymore.

Well, SATA calls it TRIM, SCSI calls it UNMAP and NVMe calls it DEALLOCATE. It's just different names for the same operation.

 

[Silly John Fatty]

Well, SATA calls it TRIM, SCSI calls it UNMAP and NVMe calls it DEALLOCATE. It's just different names for the same operation.

Probably. I won't modify anything here I think. Apple knows better how they set up its hard- & software. And by the way, I was just quoting what other people had said. Wasn't pretending it was right (or wrong).

Just trying to best way to take care of your SSD here.

By the way, are the 2023 Mac Mini's SSDs NVMes?

 

[ojfd]

.. SCSI calls it UNMAP ...

I've never seen this one back in the Macs with SCSI days.