Terrific, yes indeed they are very friendly and really try to help.
Escalating is good and an important first step for them.
Good luck! đź‘Ť
Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written
- Thread starter Forti
- WikiPost WikiPost
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
- Status
Escalating is good and an important first step for them.
Good luck! đź‘Ť
So, after two people (including a "senior advisor") who didn't know much and asked me funny questions (like "have you tried with another user account?" which doesn't help when the issue is reported by the drive's smart data and I have even reinstalled the OS from scratch after erasing the disk..), someone from Apple called me right away and while all the people I have interacted were very friendly, I didn't go far. They basically told me there is not much they can do because a) I don't have a technical issue / something broken yet, b) Apple doesn't support third party tools like smartmontools and DriveDX. He couldn't answer when I asked if there is a way to get SMART data directly in macOS (Disk Utility just says if SMART is verified/passed or not and nothing else). If I understood correctly (I have problems on the phone) he said he will forward feedback to engineering. But there isn't much they can do now.
I understand that I don't have anything "broken" yet, and he understood that I am concerned about the life of the drive and thus of the computer. I hope that as more people report this issue, Apple will finally investigate and give some statement or something at least.
I understand that I don't have anything "broken" yet, and he understood that I am concerned about the life of the drive and thus of the computer. I hope that as more people report this issue, Apple will finally investigate and give some statement or something at least.
Yeah I mentioned it in a previous message. I have disabled TimeMachine automatic backups and will see tomorrow how much has been written during sleep, because TimeMachine is my prime suspect re: something that wakes the computer from sleep regularly and can write to disk.
I wish they'd add a 'SMART drive information' tab to the System Report. That way we'd have Apple sanctioned data for the customer support and technical staff to use.
Thanks Vito.
My take on this, Apple shows its public face through their service staff while the engineers probably scrambling like made to get to the bottom of this issue. The customer representatives have to give you what they are told, i.e. the Apple party line I am afraid. As expected.
But the more folks get in touch with them on this issue the more the pressure cooker within Apple boils. My naive thinking.
I think it was there until a few macOS versions ago if I remember correctly? I think they removed it recently but I am not sure. What if they removed it so that people wouldn't see the excessively fast tear lol
They could also add it to iostat, so it would report 'session,' and 'lifetime.'
I've temporarily stopped using LR Classic in the first part of my workflow; rather then open LR and choose edit in Photoshop I am now editing directly from Photoshop. Once I've done all the edits then I'll resynchronise into LR and finish off what I have to do with the images.
I still see a lot of writes from launchd but not as many as when LR Classic is running. What I also get in Photoshop is; if I leave the window inactive for a while, go to another app, and then return to continue the edits then I get a beachball. Shouldn't be waiting for disk access as all the temporary files are pointed to a very fast external SSD.
all they gotta do is look at Activity Monitor, and Data Written by kernel_task mine is sitting at 1.49TB so far at almost 3 days of uptime.
The trouble here is also to understand if the numbers that we read are reported correctly or is a bug in the ARM macOS that reads wrong datas.
If it's a normal behavior for ARM unified memory, I wonder if it's a real trouble, because it should works very similar also with iPad/iPhone and the lifespan of the other ARM Apple devices is normal. Maybe it works in this way and Apple has optmized the SSD controller in the ARM SoC to works in this way and we are talking about a non problem.
I have no idea, but just for this reason an official Apple statment would be (very) helpful!
If it's a normal behavior for ARM unified memory, I wonder if it's a real trouble, because it should works very similar also with iPad/iPhone and the lifespan of the other ARM Apple devices is normal. Maybe it works in this way and Apple has optmized the SSD controller in the ARM SoC to works in this way and we are talking about a non problem.
I have no idea, but just for this reason an official Apple statment would be (very) helpful!
After disabling electron apps that are still running under Rosetta (excluding the newly updated Notion), I have noticed disk writes have slowed. Getting rid of Teams and Spotify genuinely helped. I now use the web version of Teams via Edge.
Using Universal apps may be of help.
Using Universal apps may be of help.
I use three Electron based apps that I created myself with nativefier for web apps I use constantly, but I built them for ARM, so they run natively, not under Rosetta. I am gonna look if there are some x86 apps I am using currently that have been updated to Apple silicon. I haven't checked in the past few weeks.
In my experience, being passed to the senior advisor is what they do to politely tell you Foxtrot Oscar, as there is no more help they can give you. Hopefully it's logged as another concern in the system though. But as daverdfw says, all they need to do is look at Activity Monitor to see the excessive writes being reported, and therefore that something isn't right.
I've got an M1 MBP that I'm transitioning to. But I'll limit my time on that for a few more weeks to see if they issue a fix. In the meantime I'm using my 2018 15" MBP, which by comparison has been in use or sleeping all day. Ok it's only been used for light tasks today with email, office, safari, and Time Machine backups. But to total amount written is just over 2GB.
At least with this older MBP, I just have butterfly keyboard failure to be concerned with. Don't you just love the anxiety these premium machines can create!
I've got an M1 MBP that I'm transitioning to. But I'll limit my time on that for a few more weeks to see if they issue a fix. In the meantime I'm using my 2018 15" MBP, which by comparison has been in use or sleeping all day. Ok it's only been used for light tasks today with email, office, safari, and Time Machine backups. But to total amount written is just over 2GB.
At least with this older MBP, I just have butterfly keyboard failure to be concerned with. Don't you just love the anxiety these premium machines can create!
I attach a screenshot that I could not the other day, because I lost the screenshot, but for 4 hours working on 2 small documents with Word, in one of them with 4 screenshots.Almost 2 Gb of disk writing, which makes little sense.
I also only have Preview, Telegram, WhatsApp, Safari with 3 tabs and DeepL open.
Then I put screenshot of the memory, and it does not even reach 10Gb of RAM occupied, but you can see 5Gb cached.
I have the suspicion that these 5Gb in cache have some relation but I am not sure. And it also seems clear that OSX has some problem with memory paging.
What they say in Apple that smartmon or DriveDx are not official applications, we can agree, but it's enough to talk about their Activity Monitor data to see if it seems normal to them, and that in one session 1Tb or 500Gb have been written to disk....
I also only have Preview, Telegram, WhatsApp, Safari with 3 tabs and DeepL open.
Then I put screenshot of the memory, and it does not even reach 10Gb of RAM occupied, but you can see 5Gb cached.
I have the suspicion that these 5Gb in cache have some relation but I am not sure. And it also seems clear that OSX has some problem with memory paging.
What they say in Apple that smartmon or DriveDx are not official applications, we can agree, but it's enough to talk about their Activity Monitor data to see if it seems normal to them, and that in one session 1Tb or 500Gb have been written to disk....
Attachments
The check with another user account is standard troubleshooting flow on a Mac. There are quite a few weird issues that can be solved by creating a brand new user account, generally speaking.
I think people reporting this issue should focus on the Apple stuff and not even mention smartmontools or anything like that, because that just gives them a way out. So instead talk about kernel_task and mdutil or whatever process you are seeing reporting very high writes (especially when you are seeing hundreds of gigabytes) . That way there is actually something to troubleshoot.
is the right column for data written after selecting kernel_task for all time or just uptime?
Mine is like 0.5tb on my 256gb
I certainly see Sleep/Wake as being a large part of the problem on my 16GB/1TB Mini. Every time it goes to sleep it writes ~20GB, then it writes another ~20GB when it wakes (observed via Activity Monitor). Kernal_task has written about 1TB in the last 2.5 days. Everything else combined only adds up to 40GB written.
I have ~90 tabs open in Safari. I closed about 10 non-essential tabs last night when the discussion turned this direction. I need to close another 10.
Other apps always running: Thunderbird (mail app) & BBEdit.
Background apps: DriveDX, Lastpass, AVG, Parallels Toolbox, Bluetooth (headphones).
Apps occasionally running: Clanlord, Clieunk, Vienna, Calendar, System Prefs, and other stuff.
I have not disabled Spotlight.
I do not have Lightroom. I only backup with Time Machine manually (I have not run it since transferring to this mini 4 days ago).
I have ~90 tabs open in Safari. I closed about 10 non-essential tabs last night when the discussion turned this direction. I need to close another 10.
Other apps always running: Thunderbird (mail app) & BBEdit.
Background apps: DriveDX, Lastpass, AVG, Parallels Toolbox, Bluetooth (headphones).
Apps occasionally running: Clanlord, Clieunk, Vienna, Calendar, System Prefs, and other stuff.
I have not disabled Spotlight.
I do not have Lightroom. I only backup with Time Machine manually (I have not run it since transferring to this mini 4 days ago).
Last edited:
ah ok ! Thanks
23 days uptime , 580gb written specifically
maybe I’m not part of the affected group?
Can you describe your usage?
Whats the model?
What apps do you run? Do you let it go into sleep mode?