ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

[Queen6]

Is what it is, by the time the SSD's run dry the system's will be well and truly obsoleted. I've a 2011 15" at the end of the desk, it serves up offline video. Why such concern? I don't look at R/W numbers I just use my M1 Mac and enjoy the experience, get the job done & get paid...

TLDR just use your Mac as intended.

Q-6

 

[pshufd]

Unfortunately from my observations not only it didn't improve in comparison to late Big Sur releases, but rather deteriorated further. Now on MBA M1 16Gb / 1TB I constantly observe written volume > 50% of read, primarily from kernel_task / paging, even with low pressure or swap size, which is unjustifiable. The paging bug is still alive and well in Monterey 12.5.

I checked the SSD writes thing a long time ago and didn't observe any problems with my two Apple Silicon systems. I have my systems set up so that they don't swap as I have 80 GB of RAM on my desktop. I just move programs to an Intel Mac if they are using up a lot of RAM on my M1 Mac mini.

 

[MajorFubar]

Is what it is, by the time the SSD's run dry the system's will be well and truly obsoleted. I've a 2011 15" at the end of the desk, it serves up offline video. Why such concern? I don't look at R/W numbers I just use my M1 Mac and enjoy the experience, get the job done & get paid...

TLDR just use your Mac as intended.

Q-6

Probably hypocritical of me to say this because with another head on I've been crowing loud about the M2 SSD-gate "scandal" but I think you're right in this instance. Stop looking at numbers and just use the bloody computer for what you bought it for.

 

[gank41]

For getting this in late November 2020, and for the most part I've been using my M1 MBP in Clamshell Mode up until about a month or so ago... 200 Days of Power On Hours with only 3% used after 151 TB written. Seems like I'll have this thing for quite a while

 

[evertjr]

Unfortunately from my observations not only it didn't improve in comparison to late Big Sur releases, but rather deteriorated further. Now on MBA M1 16Gb / 1TB I constantly observe written volume > 50% of read, primarily from kernel_task / paging, even with low pressure or swap size, which is unjustifiable. The paging bug is still alive and well in Monterey 12.5.

I don't know about Big Sur but compared to previous versions of Monterey its drastically better. In my usage it easily writes 1TB per day, but since the release of 12.5 it only wrote 80gb so far. Right now my swap size is 4.5gb and the memory pressure is surprisingly green so they definitely did something. On 12.4 the only time I saw the memory pressure green was on a fresh boot with nothing opened lol

 

[Queen6]

I don't know about Big Sur but compared to previous versions of Monterey its drastically better. In my usage it easily writes 1TB per day, but since the release of 12.5 it only wrote 80gb so far. Right now my swap size is 4.5gb and the memory pressure is surprisingly green so they definitely did something. On 12.4 the only time I saw the memory pressure green was on a fresh boot with nothing opened lol

Just rolled the dice and upgraded my 13" M1 MBP to Monterey. Don't want to be too far behind, nor at the cutting edge. I'll see how it goes...

Q-6

 

[pshufd]

I don't know about Big Sur but compared to previous versions of Monterey its drastically better. In my usage it easily writes 1TB per day, but since the release of 12.5 it only wrote 80gb so far. Right now my swap size is 4.5gb and the memory pressure is surprisingly green so they definitely did something. On 12.4 the only time I saw the memory pressure green was on a fresh boot with nothing opened lol

I'm running Monterey on my 2021 MacBook Pro 16 (32 GB RAM) and I'd say that there are leaks in 12.4. I haven't run 12.5 long enough to get a feel for RAM use.

I am also running the latest version of Big Sur on a 2014 iMac 27 and it leaks RAM - I'd guess that some memory leak bugs were backported from Monterey last fall. The leaks are mild, though. My system has been up 11 days and it's using 20.5 GB and an additional 7 for cache and 171 MB Swap. I would have to reboot it every ten days or so in the past.

I am also running a maintenance release of Big Sur on an M1 mini. I was running the latest on it but it had several bugs such that I had to reboot it every day. One of the bugs involved memory leaks which are more of an issue as the mini has half the RAM of the iMac. The other was a network bug where the network just wouldn't connect to some websites and the only solution I found was a reboot. It's possible that that bug was fixed in Monterey 12.4 as I haven't run into it on my 2021 MacBook Pro is a few months but it was definitely a backport of a bug as I started seeing it early 2022.

I think that what you do matters a lot of memory leaks. In the early days of Monterey, using external monitors seemed to leak a lot of RAM and Apple fixed that pretty quickly. If you didn't use external monitors, then you may have never seen it. It might be an issue in a specific program, Apple or third-party. I think that most people don't see memory leaks these days or they may have small or slow leaks that don't really make a difference.

One question I have: can you put the swap file on an external drive? It wouldn't be as fast as the internal storage but you wouldn't have the contention that you would normally get on the system when you are swapping. I was reading up on the Crucial MX 4 TB SSD and read that that model has 4 GB of DRAM cache so using it for swap could be very fast assuming that there's a lot of bandwidth to get to it.

 

[pshufd]

Just rolled the dice and upgraded my 13" M1 MBP to Monterey. Don't want to be too far behind, nor at the cutting edge. I'll see how it goes...

Q-6

One thing that I noticed with 12.5 is that there are a huge number of security fixes. I'm pretty sure that those will be backported to Big Sur.

 

[Queen6]

Probably hypocritical of me to say this because with another head on I've been crowing loud about the M2 SSD-gate "scandal" but I think you're right in this instance. Stop looking at numbers and just use the bloody computer for what you bought it for.

Honestly I think it's the best policy. Use it and abuse it, had I listened to the naysayers I'd have scrapped my 2011 15" more than half a decade ago. The 2011 is clearly flawed, yet some soldier on...

Little lazy as the 2011 is now pushing 10.8 years

Enjoy your Mac forget the speculation, it's a far better deal by a wide margin this you can trust

Q-6

 

[vs40]

Power On Hours are not right for me...
Only 443 hours in 13 months?
I'm using my laptop 8-12 hours every day. It should be at least few thousands hours.
I can only assume, it counts only hours when internal display is on, because I'm using it with external one most of the time.

 

[ZebedeeG]

Power On Hours are not right for me...
Only 443 hours in 13 months?
I'm using my laptop 8-12 hours every day. It should be at least few thousands hours.
I can only assume, it counts only hours when internal display is on, because I'm using it with external one most of the time.

View attachment 2033518

Mine shows 590 hours "Power On Time"

That's on a 24" iMac, 12 months old, 10 - 12 hours daily use and when I'm away from it the screensaver's left running.

Incidentally mine's at 11.1TB written on a 2TB disk, so it ought to outlive me!

 

[pshufd]

I ran DriveDX on my M1 Mac mini (16 GB/512 GB in use since July 2021) and it has 5.8 TB writes and 100% Status. This system is also used as a NAS with a 2 TB external SSD though. This system mainly runs Cloud applications and it rarely swaps. If it does swap, then the swap space is usually well under 500 MB.

Available Spare is 100%
Life Percentage Used is 0
Total Reads is 10.4 TB.
Power On hours are 285 but this is incorrect as the system is used for eight hours a day during the business week and this is for the past year. It's possible that it should be Power On days as that would seem reasonable to me.

I have done some video editing on it and also a small amount of software development but this system looks and feels new. The drive stats confirm that. The expected TBW lifetime I found in an Apple Support question is 600 TBW so I guess this thing should last 100 years.

My office stuff typically uses about 20 GB of RAM and I do that on a 2014 iMac 27 with 32 GB of RAM. That system also has a 512 GB SSD.

DriveDX reports:

81% Wear Leveling Count
82.6 TB Writes or 99% okay

So about 10 TBW per year on this system. This system was used for commercial video production up until late 2021 when I bought it from the company. So I don't know what my typical writes are like. It doesn't matter that much because I can replace the SSD in this Mac.

My 2021 MacBook Pro 16 (32 GB/1 TB) has 4.2 TB writes so a higher rate than the M1 mini. Everything is fine on the SSD as far as I can tell. It should last 1,200/9 years at this rate.

The last time I checked my Apple Silicon systems was around December or January when there was a lot of concern about this and it was fine back then as well.

I do work to make sure that my systems don't swap by spreading work out on multiple systems and getting the best bang for the buck on RAM. 32 GB of RAM on the 2014 iMac is $100 while that's $800 for Apple's RAM so it makes sense to run things that don't require a lot of CPU horsepower but do use up a fair amount of RAM on Intel systems. Especially if those Intel systems are dirt cheap.

 

[jdb8167]

Power On Hours are not right for me...
Only 443 hours in 13 months?
I'm using my laptop 8-12 hours every day. It should be at least few thousands hours.
I can only assume, it counts only hours when internal display is on, because I'm using it with external one most of the time.

View attachment 2033518

I’m fairly certain that power on hours is the time when the SSD controller is actually in use. The rest of the time it is effectively off when you are not reading from or writing to the SSD.

 

[pshufd]

I just ran DriveDX on my 2010 iMac for fun. 17,454 hours (24 months, 7 days, 6 hours) of Power On Time. All drive health is 100% which is a bit surprising. I bought this in January for $100 but it looks like it was well cared for. It has 2,319 power cycles which sounds about right for something this old. The HDD sensor is gone which may be why they sold it so cheap. It sounds like an airplane after it has been on for 30 minutes. I just installed Macs Fan Control which fixed the problem.

 

[Thistle41]

I'm running Monterey on my 2021 MacBook Pro 16 (32 GB RAM) and I'd say that there are leaks in 12.4. I haven't run 12.5 long enough to get a feel for RAM use.

I am also running the latest version of Big Sur on a 2014 iMac 27 and it leaks RAM - I'd guess that some memory leak bugs were backported from Monterey last fall. The leaks are mild, though. My system has been up 11 days and it's using 20.5 GB and an additional 7 for cache and 171 MB Swap. I would have to reboot it every ten days or so in the past.

I am also running a maintenance release of Big Sur on an M1 mini. I was running the latest on it but it had several bugs such that I had to reboot it every day. One of the bugs involved memory leaks which are more of an issue as the mini has half the RAM of the iMac. The other was a network bug where the network just wouldn't connect to some websites and the only solution I found was a reboot. It's possible that that bug was fixed in Monterey 12.4 as I haven't run into it on my 2021 MacBook Pro is a few months but it was definitely a backport of a bug as I started seeing it early 2022.

I think that what you do matters a lot of memory leaks. In the early days of Monterey, using external monitors seemed to leak a lot of RAM and Apple fixed that pretty quickly. If you didn't use external monitors, then you may have never seen it. It might be an issue in a specific program, Apple or third-party. I think that most people don't see memory leaks these days or they may have small or slow leaks that don't really make a difference.

One question I have: can you put the swap file on an external drive? It wouldn't be as fast as the internal storage but you wouldn't have the contention that you would normally get on the system when you are swapping. I was reading up on the Crucial MX 4 TB SSD and read that that model has 4 GB of DRAM cache so using it for swap could be very fast assuming that there's a lot of bandwidth to get to it.

Interesting thanks. regarding external RAM for swap I'm not sure that without digging down into the OS you could alter that. There is a guy on Youtube who converted his Mac Mini to be all external SSD as the base model filled up (he's a photographer).

How to Upgrade your M1 Mac mini Storage! - Part 1

I may be tempted as I have the same kit as a second computer.

 

[pshufd]

Interesting thanks. regarding external RAM for swap I'm not sure that without digging down into the OS you could alter that. There is a guy on Youtube who converted his Mac Mini to be all external SSD as the base model filled up (he's a photographer).

How to Upgrade your M1 Mac mini Storage! - Part 1

I may be tempted as I have the same kit as a second computer.

Thanks for the video. I'm going through it right now while checking things on the Internet. It appears that SSD prices have crashed this year. I looked at a Tom's article with the Crucial P5 NVMe SSD and the MSRP is $367.99 for 2 TB while Amazon has it now for $230. This model has almost twice the read and write speeds of the Samsung EVO and 2 TB of DRAM cache so it would be interesting to see if that makes a difference. Don found slightly better read speeds on the external SSD but writes were half of the internal drive. I wonder if a faster drive would fix that. Don said that the enclosure and NVMe SSD cost him $500 Canadian dollars. The SSD he bought is now $180 US and the enclosure is $170. Those USB 4 enclosures are really expensive!

I expect the USB 4 enclosure will come down over time. USB 3 enclosures are typically $10 to $30 depending on speed.

So this approach is still relatively expensive. Cheaper than Apple but that's not saying much. I expect that 2 TB SSDs will fall over time along with the enclosures. So this may be a much more attractive solution in a year or two. I have added a link to that video in my tech notebook to revisit in a year or two.

 

[doboy]

Thanks for the video. I'm going through it right now while checking things on the Internet. It appears that SSD prices have crashed this year. I looked at a Tom's article with the Crucial P5 NVMe SSD and the MSRP is $367.99 for 2 TB while Amazon has it now for $230. This model has almost twice the read and write speeds of the Samsung EVO and 2 TB of DRAM cache so it would be interesting to see if that makes a difference. Don found slightly better read speeds on the external SSD but writes were half of the internal drive. I wonder if a faster drive would fix that. Don said that the enclosure and NVMe SSD cost him $500 Canadian dollars. The SSD he bought is now $180 US and the enclosure is $170. Those USB 4 enclosures are really expensive!

I expect the USB 4 enclosure will come down over time. USB 3 enclosures are typically $10 to $30 depending on speed.

So this approach is still relatively expensive. Cheaper than Apple but that's not saying much. I expect that 2 TB SSDs will fall over time along with the enclosures. So this may be a much more attractive solution in a year or two. I have added a link to that video in my tech notebook to revisit in a year or two.

I doubt it has 2TB of DRAM, haha. Also USB 4 enclosures likely wouldn't come close to USB 3 enclosure price anytime soon. The speed matches TB3 so it'll stay high for a long while.

 

[theorist9]

2019 i9 iMac with 32 GB RAM and 2 TB WD SN850.

After 59 days of use, nearly all on MacOS 12.4, I get 8.71 TB written.

That seems like a lot, since it works out to:
8.71*10^12 byte /(59 days) /(10^9 byte/GB) = 148 GB/day written.

Plus it's not due to swap, since my memory pressure nearly is always green, and 'swap used' is nearly always zero.

 

[IceStormNG]

For **** and giggles, I just checked my old 2015 MacBook Pro with a measly 256GB SSD that got abused all the time. The mac is around 2500 days old (Coconut Battery read-out). I used it a lot with virtual machines and was mainly for coding in Xcode and IntelliJ. The SSD was always near full (yeah.. I shouldn't have cheaped out on storage... but hey it still works) which makes it pretty surprising that it is still in such a good shape.

The SSD is still above 85% lifetime left... but the MacBook is barely usable due to other factors (it's just slow and macOS Monterey really bogs it down, battery also isn't that reliable anymore even though the battery got replaced a year ago).

In the end... I really stopped caring about SSD writes and only check every now and then for other warnings to not get any surprise failures.

On my Windows PC, my SSDs get abused constantly with render caches and video render outputs. They're all still above 95% lifetime even though they got hammered with writes over the years.

I don't have an M1 mac (yet), but I still cannot wrap my head around those crazy write numbers that I see here. Like.. I'm abusing my SSDs with high write volumes and other stuff you "shouldn't" do to them and their writes is still lower after all the years than some "brand new" and "lightly used" M1 Macs.

Let's see, when I replace that old 2015 MBP with a new Mac, whether I experience the same issue ,like some here do, or not...

 

[osplo]

For **** and giggles, I just checked my old 2015 MacBook Pro with a measly 256GB SSD that got abused all the time. The mac is around 2500 days old (Coconut Battery read-out). I used it a lot with virtual machines and was mainly for coding in Xcode and IntelliJ. The SSD was always near full (yeah.. I shouldn't have cheaped out on storage... but hey it still works) which makes it pretty surprising that it is still in such a good shape.

The SSD is still above 85% lifetime left... but the MacBook is barely usable due to other factors (it's just slow and macOS Monterey really bogs it down, battery also isn't that reliable anymore even though the battery got replaced a year ago).

In the end... I really stopped caring about SSD writes and only check every now and then for other warnings to not get any surprise failures.

On my Windows PC, my SSDs get abused constantly with render caches and video render outputs. They're all still above 95% lifetime even though they got hammered with writes over the years.

I don't have an M1 mac (yet), but I still cannot wrap my head around those crazy write numbers that I see here. Like.. I'm abusing my SSDs with high write volumes and other stuff you "shouldn't" do to them and their writes is still lower after all the years than some "brand new" and "lightly used" M1 Macs.

Let's see, when I replace that old 2015 MBP with a new Mac, whether I experience the same issue ,like some here do, or not...

Very few crazy numbers lately. If you want an M1 or M2 computer, just buy it, you'll be enormously happy.

 

[osplo]

2019 i9 iMac with 32 GB RAM and 2 TB WD SN850.

After 59 days of use, nearly all on MacOS 12.4, I get 8.71 TB written.

That seems like a lot, since it works out to:
8.71*10^12 byte /(59 days) /(10^9 byte/GB) = 148 GB/day written.

Plus it's not due to swap, since my memory pressure nearly is always green, and 'swap used' is nearly always zero.

View attachment 2033754

You are in the wrong thread as this is for Apple Silicon computers. However if your 2019 Intel computer is relatively new as you mentioned (!) chances are that the initial Data Units Written was high right from the start (OS installs, factory checks, apps installs and all kind of initialization). My two cents: check again in a month and see the delta to see a reliable measure. Install 12.5 first, it might help.

 

[IceStormNG]

Very few crazy numbers lately. If you want an M1 or M2 computer, just buy it, you'll be enormously happy.

Well, yeah that's the plan. But I just bought a laptop a few months ago. So... this will have to wait. I only need the mac for Xcode and iOS development, so I will likely buy a cheap (well, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD,.. so not that cheap) Mac Mini refurbished at some point when the 2015 doesn't run the latest Xcode anymore. Which is probably in half a year, as Ventura doesn't support the 2015, and in Feburary, Xcode requires the latest macOS, like it always did.

 

[Queen6]

I don't worry about it, you purchase a Mac that meets your needs or move to Windows. My base M1 13" MBP continuers to excel. So what it may not make the first or second decade, neither will any of my Windows systems. Is what it is...

Q-6

 

[robfoll]

13.0b MBA M1 8/256 (11/20) View attachment 2032880

What software produced that report for you?

 

[gank41]

What software produced that report for you?

How to check your Mac’s SSD health using Terminal

Learn how to set up the Terminal in macOS so you can install and run smartmontools, a utility that provides data on the health of your SSD.

www.macworld.com