ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

[stigman]

That's MacBook abuse!

 

[stigman]

What the hell do you do with your MBP? For reference, I'm nearing 1 year with the MBA and have only 8.7 TB written according to smart-data

That's MacBook abuse!

 

[altaic]

What the hell do you do with your MBP? For reference, I'm nearing 1 year with the MBA and have only 8.7 TB written according to smart-data

800 TB / 11 months is “only” 27.67 MB/s continuous. If it never goes to sleep, a memory leak or other memory bug could wreak such havoc on that poor 256 GB SSD.

 

[Thistle41]

My M1 8GB/256GB MacBook Pro has written over 800TB!! to disc in 11 months and Smart data showing 29% SSD life left. Currently at Apple Store.

OK, so this is my record below, (initially manual recording now a silly little script run off a cron job each hour), of TBW on my MBA 256/8. Reports 64TBW as of today and it goes through about 60Gb/day on average. Still seems a bit much but nowhere near that figure you quote but far higher than others have quoted!

I've followed the advice on the first page, updated at every official release so now on Monterey 12.0.1. I had a routine of logging out when I walked off for a month or so back but since the latest update was done 31 Oct I've just closed the lid (mostly). The % used is 3% so interesting with that 29% left (I assume 71% used reported?). I have settled on Firefox and just do a weekly Zoom and some Youtube but nothing intensive like photo editing. As others have said, something somewhere is leaking memory and by my logging out it resets the free allocation so the swap doesn't build up. However, since Monterey, I will just close the lid for now and see what happens to the plot.

I would dearly like to know what they find out at Apple, though I doubt that will be told.

 

[stigman]

One tab, Facebook profile 1,53GB - ram management on MacBook is slightly overhyped.

 

[osplo]

This is the thread that never dies.

Bought it in February, sporadic usage, mostly Safari & office apps & some photoshop/lightroom/final cut, always on, still on Big Sur, Units Written: 4.13 TB.

The SSD will still be fine three centuries after I'm gone.

 

[stigman]

This is the thread that never dies.

Bought it in February, sporadic usage, mostly Safari & office apps & some photoshop/lightroom/final cut, always on, still on Big Sur, Units Written: 4.13 TB.

The SSD will still be fine three centuries after I'm gone.

It won't die since problem seems to be unsolved...or it's partly solved. Personally, I'd be calm and happy if I could find SSD chip for M1 on the market.

OK, so this is my record below, (initially manual recording now a silly little script run off a cron job each hour), of TBW on my MBA 256/8. Reports 64TBW as of today and it goes through about 60Gb/day on average. Still seems a bit much but nowhere near that figure you quote but far higher than others have quoted!

I've followed the advice on the first page, updated at every official release so now on Monterey 12.0.1. I had a routine of logging out when I walked off for a month or so back but since the latest update was done 31 Oct I've just closed the lid (mostly). The % used is 3% so interesting with that 29% left (I assume 71% used reported?). I have settled on Firefox and just do a weekly Zoom and some Youtube but nothing intensive like photo editing. As others have said, something somewhere is leaking memory and by my logging out it resets the free allocation so the swap doesn't build up. However, since Monterey, I will just close the lid for now and see what happens to the plot.

I would dearly like to know what they find out at Apple, though I doubt that will be told.
View attachment 1902772

did you turn off indexing or Time Machine backup? Is it only kernel which writes so much or other process?

 

[Thistle41]

It won't die since problem seems to be unsolved...or it's partly solved. Personally, I'd be calm and happy if I could find SSD chip for M1.

did you turn off indexing or Time Machine backup? Is it only kernel which writes so much or other process?

I've only got indexing for applications, no other locations are ticked. However, I doubt that all those folk report no problem at all with SSD writes have turned off indexing.

Time Machine: I do have this on automatic backup, forgot about turning that off, I will try and see what the results show.

The latest results are a bit frightening. The only thing I did was close the lid last night (14 Nov)?!

 

[robfoll]

My M1 8GB/256GB MacBook Pro has written over 800TB!! to disc in 11 months and Smart data showing 29% SSD life left. Currently at Apple Store.

SUCCESS SOLVED - I've had many OS versions beta and otherwise and always thought that at some point I had done a complete Zero Wipe and reinstall. Turns out I probably had not. James at Apple Store Doncaster (Melbourne) took me seriously, did a deep diagnosis which showed no problems and then with my permission, wiped, reinstalled Monterey and hard-tested for two days. No faults were found BUT the high kernel task usage, mad disc write, stuttering and SSD wear appear to have vanished. Something was clearly hanging on from an old beta I guess, so totally my fault. With Australian consumer law MacBook, warranty is 3 years, so tons of time to keep an eye on that SSD and now the machine is faster than ever.

 

[stigman]

SUCCESS SOLVED - I've had many OS versions beta and otherwise and always thought that at some point I had done a complete Zero Wipe and reinstall. Turns out I probably had not. James at Apple Store Doncaster (Melbourne) took me seriously, did a deep diagnosis which showed no problems and then with my permission, wiped, reinstalled Monterey and hard-tested for two days. No faults were found BUT the high kernel task usage, mad disc write, stuttering and SSD wear appear to have vanished. Something was clearly hanging on from an old beta I guess, so totally my fault. With Australian consumer law MacBook, warranty is 3 years, so tons of time to keep an eye on that SSD and now the machine is faster than ever.

have you noticed any drop in performance of ssd after 800 TB?

 

[Thistle41]

{Removed as reply to wrong post}

 

[Thistle41]

SUCCESS SOLVED - I've had many OS versions beta and otherwise and always thought that at some point I had done a complete Zero Wipe and reinstall. Turns out I probably had not. James at Apple Store Doncaster (Melbourne) took me seriously, did a deep diagnosis which showed no problems and then with my permission, wiped, reinstalled Monterey and hard-tested for two days. No faults were found BUT the high kernel task usage, mad disc write, stuttering and SSD wear appear to have vanished. Something was clearly hanging on from an old beta I guess, so totally my fault. With Australian consumer law MacBook, warranty is 3 years, so tons of time to keep an eye on that SSD and now the machine is faster than ever.

Good news for sure, but in my case, there is definitely a correlation between shutting the lid each night for several days running, see my graph above. When I log out each night then there is around 2.2Gb/hr written. If it were me, I would still keep an eye on the usage as I have only installed official releases of macOS as soon as they come out (along with updates) so assuming the hardware is identical and the macOS is at the same release (12.0.1 in my case) then this is possibly still around.

The only clue that occurs to me is the Time Machine alert that optionally can require power connected to do the backup as I have found having power connected also stops the runaway SSD writing activity. I have that option off at the moment.

 

[MrGunnyPT]

I'm not having any SWAP on my 14" MacBook Pro compared to the 12-15GB I did end up having in my MacBook Air, however apps like MS Teams are using 2-3GB of RAM. Let's hope we can get these apps updated to use apple silicon natively supported and get rid of the bloody Electron.

 

[robfoll]

have you noticed any drop in performance of ssd after 800 TB?

Seems to be fine so far as far as I can tell

 

[telo123]

I'm not having any SWAP on my 14" MacBook Pro compared to the 12-15GB I did end up having in my MacBook Air, however apps like MS Teams are using 2-3GB of RAM. Let's hope we can get these apps updated to use apple silicon natively supported and get rid of the bloody Electron.

My god, I hate Teams on my M1 Air. Nuisance of an app.

 

[robfoll]

My god, I hate Teams on my M1 Air. Nuisance of an app.

Yes. And same with Evernote Which I think is electron too? And Jalbum, Dropbox and a couple of other M1 laggards? No excuse after a year of Apple Silicon.

 

[MrGunnyPT]

My god, I hate Teams on my M1 Air. Nuisance of an app.

If it wasnt't for my corporation to have everything "focused" around it, I wouldn't even use the bloody thing

 

[Aquaporin]

I miss x86 architecture esp. having option for boot camp, all things considered. My prior intel MBP had 16 gb ram and lasted until the keyboard failed. Meanwhile this MBP M1 has 8 GB and writes hundreds of GB in a weekly session and based on this thread will likely suffer drive failure before the hardward.

 

[telo123]

If it wasnt't for my corporation to have everything "focused" around it, I wouldn't even use the bloody thing

I'm a student and when I know I'm not presenting or using any critical function, I do use Teams on Chrome as I find it smoother. On days where I have to present or the 1/10 chance that Teams doesn't want to function as a webapp, I resort to the desktop version to ensure maximal compatibility and such, and this is the time I hate.

I just don't understand what is taking so long for the developers of Teams to make it an M1 App. Microsoft was one of the quickest to update their Office apps to be universal, but left Teams out. If Zoom can do it, I think they could too. Even Spotify was able to do it quicker and people complained about that for ages.

 

[telo123]

Yes. And same with Evernote Which I think is electron too? And Jalbum, Dropbox and a couple of other M1 laggards? No excuse after a year of Apple Silicon.

Yeah, I don't understand why. Is it refusal to update? Is it because they don't know how to? Is it laziness or is it maybe the population of AS users are too small of a user database to worry about? Eventually, AS population will grow to a significant amount on the Mac side of PC's to the point where they can't ignore it. You'd think they'd be ahead of the game, but no.

 

[pshufd]

Yeah, I don't understand why. Is it refusal to update? Is it because they don't know how to? Is it laziness or is it maybe the population of AS users are too small of a user database to worry about? Eventually, AS population will grow to a significant amount on the Mac side of PC's to the point where they can't ignore it. You'd think they'd be ahead of the game, but no.

Software engineers are lazy but we like to say that we're efficient. Apple will have to make an announcement that they are removing Rosetta 2 by the next release of macOS to get companies to do a proper port.

 

[MrGunnyPT]

I'm a student and when I know I'm not presenting or using any critical function, I do use Teams on Chrome as I find it smoother. On days where I have to present or the 1/10 chance that Teams doesn't want to function as a webapp, I resort to the desktop version to ensure maximal compatibility and such, and this is the time I hate.

I just don't understand what is taking so long for the developers of Teams to make it an M1 App. Microsoft was one of the quickest to update their Office apps to be universal, but left Teams out. If Zoom can do it, I think they could too. Even Spotify was able to do it quicker and people complained about that for ages.

Well yeah but it simply isn't an option for us in the corporate world, the web version misses some critical features alongside some less use of the apps within Teams

 

[Thistle41]

SUCCESS SOLVED - I've had many OS versions beta and otherwise and always thought that at some point I had done a complete Zero Wipe and reinstall. Turns out I probably had not. James at Apple Store Doncaster (Melbourne) took me seriously, did a deep diagnosis which showed no problems and then with my permission, wiped, reinstalled Monterey and hard-tested for two days. No faults were found BUT the high kernel task usage, mad disc write, stuttering and SSD wear appear to have vanished. Something was clearly hanging on from an old beta I guess, so totally my fault. With Australian consumer law MacBook, warranty is 3 years, so tons of time to keep an eye on that SSD and now the machine is faster than ever.

I'm wondering if I should try doing that, complete wipe, and reinstall. I've done this on earlier releases before Catalina but there is a new disk layout I think? I have TM backups so not sure if I could do it directly from those or do a 'migration'? Does anyone in here have any pointers or advice, please?

 

[jdb8167]

Probably a useless update but my M1 1 TB MacBook Air purchased on November 17, 2020 just rolled over from 0% used to 1% used. When it showed 15.8 TB it also showed Percentage Used at 0%.

Available Spare = 100%
Available Spare Threshold = 99%
Percentage Used = 1%
Data Units Read = 57,063,173 [29.2 TB]
Data Units Written = 31,092,919 [15.9 TB]

So I guess I'm good for 100 years or so. This also confirms to me that a normally used 1 TB M1 MBA SSD has a TBW of about 1600 TB. This isn't an absolute though since things like how full your SSD is will affect the Percentage Used number because of write amplification.

 

[coresome]

A little late to the party, but here I am.

I dont think this issue is isolated to m1 macs. Below are my intel macbookpro 15" 2018 (MacBookPro15,1) with 256gb ssd and 16gb ram over 2-3 yr of use:

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 37 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 40%
Data Units Read: 743,338,279 [380 TB]
Data Units Written: 715,290,167 [366 TB]
Host Read Commands: 9,288,221,844
Host Write Commands: 4,718,218,103
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 198
Power On Hours: 3,309
Unsafe Shutdowns: 73
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0

not too big considering 2-3 yrs of use, but still I think it's a lot.


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