ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

[stigman]

M1 Max 1TB 32GB

Device currently has an uptime of 6 days and it's written 735GB.

are the biggest culprits. I don't do anything but browse the web. No development or production work. Pure web browsing and Spotify.

Anyone know why these processes are writing so much to the disk? I'm not even doing much with the device.. Already disable virtual memory swap, limited spotlight indexing to only important folders. Why the hell is photoanalysisd writing so much anyway?

Any help appreciated.

If you don't need spotlight, just turn it off in terminal with command:

sudo mdutil -a -i off

It will be disabled temporarily until you reboot your Mac.

You may also disable it completely:

MacOS Sierra: Enable/Disable Spotlight Indexing - Technipages

How to enable or disable spotlight indexing in MacOS Sierra.

www.technipages.com

 

[eldho]

M1 Max 1TB 32GB

Device currently has an uptime of 6 days and it's written 735GB.

are the biggest culprits. I don't do anything but browse the web. No development or production work. Pure web browsing and Spotify.

Anyone know why these processes are writing so much to the disk? I'm not even doing much with the device.. Already disable virtual memory swap, limited spotlight indexing to only important folders. Why the hell is photoanalysisd writing so much anyway?

Any help appreciated.

A lot of that writing will be to do with your initial set up so it would be more telling to see how much is written each day now that you are doing what you will be for your normal use of your device.

It might help you to relax if I share my situation. I have the same size SSD as you do. I am also puzzled at why I seem to average 10GB a day even when doing very little. But in a year and a half I am now up to almost 6TB. Previous analysis on this thread suggests that this is less than 0.1% of what can be expected for the life time of the SSD which gives me quite a few centuries to go!

So, while it is a bit puzzling as to why there is as much writing as there is, hopefully this will at least help you not to worry about it but simply enjoy getting on with whatever you do with your device.

 

[Mike Boreham]

M1 Max 1TB 32GB

Device currently has an uptime of 6 days and it's written 735GB.

are the biggest culprits. I don't do anything but browse the web. No development or production work. Pure web browsing and Spotify.

Anyone know why these processes are writing so much to the disk? I'm not even doing much with the device.. Already disable virtual memory swap, limited spotlight indexing to only important folders. Why the hell is photoanalysisd writing so much anyway?

Any help appreciated.

Photoanalysisd is Photos analysing for faces, duplicates, events etc

But I really wouldn't worry about it. My 1TB M1 MBP has 60TBW and has used 3% of SSD life after one year. So in ten years time it will be 30% life used. So what ?.... that seems very good for a ten year old machine. How much life do you think would have been used in 10 years on a HDD? would you still trust it?

Relax and enjoy the machine. 735GB in 6 days is 44TB in a year, probably ~2% usage. You'll reach 10% usage in roughly 5 years by which time it will old tech, and still have plenty of life.

The reason why this topic continues to cause so much angst is that we now have a way to quantify SSD life which we never had before. With HDDs we carried on in blissful ignorance until they died or we lost our nerve and replaced them. Same is true for batteries now that Battery Health is reported as a %.

 

[Gudi]

The reason why this topic continues to cause so much angst is that we now have a way to quantify SSD life which we never had before. With HDDs we carried on in blissful ignorance until they died or we lost our nerve and replaced them. Same is true for batteries now that Battery Health is reported as a %.

You conveniently forget that not everyone has a 1TB SSD and that smaller drives have a much lower TBW before they decay. I don't remember that traditional HDDs had a lifespan connected to their storage size?

 

[Mike Boreham]

You conveniently forget that not everyone has a 1TB SSD and that smaller drives have a much lower TBW before they decay. I don't remember that traditional HDDs had a lifespan connected to their storage size?

Fair comment, but I think the princilpe is the same for smaller drives.

My 512GB MBA is 26 months old has 80 TBW and 3% life used. My understanding is that a 256GB drive would be double to a first order. The arithmetic still gives over 10 years before 30% life used. Yes my 1TB MBP seems to be using life faster than my 512GB MBA, but even its rate would give many years for a 256 GB.

 

[Gudi]

My 512GB MBA is 26 months old has 80 TBW and 3% life used.

If 80 equals 3%, the whole drive must have a 2666 TBW. That seems to be unrealistic.

 

[ZebedeeG]

Has anyone actually had their SSD fail on an Apple silicon Mac..?

 

[Mike Boreham]

If 80 equals 3%, the whole drive must have a 2666 TBW. That seems to be unrealistic.

As you know there has been a lot of debate about the criteria in the previous 140 pages of this thread. Nothing very conclusive except (as I have perceived it) acceptance of DriveDx number which is where I am getting my numbers from.
There was also this post where someone discovered an Apple generated number in a MacAnalytics log which agreed with the third party Drive Dx number. I tried to get a pooling of data going here.
There has been some debate about the quoted guaranteed TBW vs typical TBW. Most components last a longer than their guaranteed minimum.
There have been a few reports of very much higher usage and so there might be a small percentage where SSD life is important.

 

[Gudi]

Nothing very conclusive except (as I have perceived it) acceptance of DriveDx number which is where I am getting my numbers from.

Okay, so if 12.7 TB written represents 1.0% of the lifetime of my 256 GB SSD. It's total TBW should be ~1250 TB. And a four times larger 1TB SSD should be good for about ~5000 TBW. Aren't these numbers too good to be true?

 

[Mike Boreham]

Okay, so if 12.7 TB written represents 1.0% of the lifetime of my 256 GB SSD. It's total TBW should be ~1250 TB. And a four times larger 1TB SSD should be good for about ~5000 TBW. Aren't these numbers too good to be true? View attachment 2140447

This is what is much discussed in the other 140 pages. (eg here). I can only repeat that the Apple generated number from the SMART data in MacAnalytics is the same as the one produced by third party apps, removing the "third parties are getting it wrong" argument.

 

[Queen6]

Has anyone actually had their SSD fail on an Apple silicon Mac..?

Not here, far too much worry on this subject. By the time my base 13" M1 MBP SSD is done the computer will be well and truly antiquated. I retain a very stock 15" 2011 for obvious reason, it's drive has been spinning for over 11 years, so I'm very less concerned with the M1's SSD. This PC has a 256GB boot drive it's written over 50TB in over four and a half years, Mac's are likely the same, we're talking over 20 years before they get close to the official limit of the drives life which they will very likely exceed by a fair margin.

IMO just a load of nonsense, drummed up by the worry wardens...


Q-6

 

[gank41]

Has anyone actually had their SSD fail on an Apple silicon Mac..?

I believe one person is referenced very very early on in these posts, and it was from a link to a Twitter post. Someone who admittingly used their computer for things that would normally not happen. Again, I apologize, but it was some developer running a database or something.

 

[eldho]

I believe one person is referenced very very early on in these posts, and it was from a link to a Twitter post. Someone who admittingly used their computer for things that would normally not happen. Again, I apologize, but it was some developer running a database or something.

A bank using it as a server I think

 

[Queen6]

A bank using it as a server I think

Was a base model Mac Mini if memory serves, which was continuously hammered being the wrong HW for the job.

Q-6

 

[Fishrrman]

Once more, for posterity, I will repeat:
TURN OFF VM disk swapping.
That may not cure ALL unnecessary disk activity, but it will quiet down A LOT of it...

 

[smirking]

Once more, for posterity, I will repeat:
TURN OFF VM disk swapping.
That may not cure ALL unnecessary disk activity, but it will quiet down A LOT of it...

Why should the average person do this though?

Is this good general advice when disk swapping is part of the system design and only in results in harm in extremely unusual cases?

 

[jdb8167]

Once more, for posterity, I will repeat:
TURN OFF VM disk swapping.
That may not cure ALL unnecessary disk activity, but it will quiet down A LOT of it...

Not a good idea.

For what it's worth, since I've gotten my M2 MacBook Air, I've only written 5.8 TB. I've been using it every workday since July 27, 2022. That is significantly less than when my M1 MacBook Air was new. The latest Mac OSes have significantly reduced the amount of writes from what I can determine. My M2 MBA does have 24 GB RAM but the M1 had 16 GB so not a huge difference.

 

[Fishrrman]

jdb wrote:
"Not a good idea."

I've been doing this FOR YEARS now.
First, with a 2012 Mini (10gb RAM).
Then, with a 2018 Mini (16gb RAM).
Now, with a 2021 MacBook Pro 14" (16gb RAM).

NEVER ONCE have I had a memory-related crash.
Not one.

I -DO- take care not to have too many apps running at once, and I NEVER use tabbed browsing.

Posting this now on my MacBook Pro 14".
From Activity Monitor:

These screenshots speak for themselves.

 

[jdb8167]

I've been doing this FOR YEARS now.

I should have been more clear. For you it's probably fine. But as a general suggestion it is less good. Most people will likely run into problems that they don't know how to resolve.

 

[rmadsen3]

The latest Mac OSes have significantly reduced the amount of writes from what I can determine.

Latest versions of macOS are full of bugs -- they're not even close to having been optimized in any way, shape, form. Happy to hear that you're happy about your own numbers but I find it hard to believe that modern-day Apple has managed to 'significantly reduce the amount of writes' performed by- and/or performed in latest versions of macOS.

 

[Gudi]

Once more, for posterity, I will repeat:
TURN OFF VM disk swapping.
That may not cure ALL unnecessary disk activity, but it will quiet down A LOT of it...

Turning off virtual memory completely would be overkill. I only need a terminal command to clear the swap without rebooting the machine. Just for my peace of mind, I want swap to be gone when memory pressure is green again. Otherwise I must learn to ignore it.

 

[yellowhelicopter]

Okay, so if 12.7 TB written represents 1.0% of the lifetime of my 256 GB SSD. It's total TBW should be ~1250 TB. And a four times larger 1TB SSD should be good for about ~5000 TBW. Aren't these numbers too good to be true?

It's not a linear ratio. The closer to 0% the faster it deteriorates.

I -DO- take care not to have too many apps running at once, and I NEVER use tabbed browsing.

It seems to me it's better just to use an external bootable drive if SSD wear bothers you and you have to resort to such self restricting measures. But if it's a Macbook and you need mobility it's not an applicable solution.

 

[Gudi]

It's not a linear ratio. The closer to 0% the faster it deteriorates.

TBW (total bytes written) is the amount of data an ssd should be good for before cell deterioration becomes a severe problem. Over-provisioning should cover for all earlier cell failures. The lifetime percentage indicator decreases inversely proportional to the amount of terabytes written to disk.

 

[evertjr]

After 1.5 year my base M1 Air is at 130TBW at 9% used. I use it pretty heavily doing software development every day, at that rate it will comfortably cross 10 years mark. Theses machines will get obsolete way before SSD wear starts to be a problem.

Even if it sounds to good to be true it's worth keeping in mind these chips were custom designed for Apple to literally be part of the SOC design, using an off the shelf SSD for reference means nothing.

 

[darngooddesign]

FWIW, after a year on my 1TBSSD M1-Pro MBP the SSD usage has been relatively consistent each month with no huge spikes in data written.

Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 0%
Data Units Read: 44,251,099 [22.6 TB]
Data Units Written: 32,809,883 [16.7 TB]