ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

[qap]

The life expectancy of SSD in M1 MacBook

The inspection of the M1 MacBook shows that Apple used a chip with the name SDRGJHI4 [5]. This means nothing but we can speculate that Apple probably used Western Digital chips [6]. As the disk is reported as an NVMe drive, we can pick some SSD drives from the Western Digital commercial OEM offer [7] that roughly matches the performance of SSD in MacBook.

The Western Digital PC SN530 NVMe SSD declares 200 TBW. The same value is declared for the SN720 drive. The Western Digital IX SN530 NVMe SSD declares 650 TBW. Very cheap WD Blue™ SN550 NVMe™ SSD can withstand 150 TBW. If Apple didn’t cheap out on SSD, in my opinion, it should withstand from 300–650 TBW for a 256GB drive. On the other hand, if we take a look at what people report we can see that probably Apple declares 1600 TBW for a 256GB drive. The users here [8] used 10% of the SSD lifespan and it is at 160 TBW which translates to 1600 TBW. Of course only if the smartctl tool is correct.

Given that most of the time Apple uses high-end parts in their devices we can assume that Apple SSD has at least 300 TBW endurance. The worst-case scenario is that SSD has 150 TBW which will translate to about 4–5 years before my SSD will die. The realistic approach is that it has 300 TBWwhich gives me around 9 years of SSD lifetime. The most optimistic forecast is that it is capable of 1600 TBW, which will give me around 50 years before I will kill my SSD.

 

[thadoggfather]

Can you describe your usage?
Whats the model?
What apps do you run? Do you let it go into sleep mode?

base air
Generally messages , safari, chrome

hasn’t been much else on this machine sadly haha

some iOS apps like Apollo and sideloaded IMDB

haven’t put it through it’s paces with editing software and not a serial tabber

usually run off battery but there are times it’s on ac power for days.
Put it to sleep manually
When I step away

 

[VitoBotta]

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).

How can you manage 90 tabs??? 😱

 

[Argon_]

ah ok ! Thanks

23 days uptime , 580gb written specifically

maybe I’m not part of the affected group?

Do you have local backups enabled?

 

[thadoggfather]

Do you have local backups enabled?

nope. Never really used time machine

my data I keep backed up manually that I care about

a full snapshot just isn’t that important for my uses

 

[souko]

M1 MBP 8/256, 7 days old, 4,53TBW. Big Sur 11.2.2

kernel_task is the main culprit.

I use it quite heavy, but memory pressure is (almost allways) green.

I had 4 kernel panics too.

Apps: Safari with about 20 tabs
Mail
pages
messages
Signal (Intel)
Telegram
iStat
AlDente
Flux
NordVPN (Intel)
Finder
AirBuddy
are (almost) allways open

Sometimes open:
TV app
Spotify
Affinity photo
Pixelmator Pro
Chrome
Brave
Firefox
notes
reminders
calendar
Rstudio (Intel)
Sensei
Terminal
Activity monitor
Coconut battery
Photos

 

[VitoBotta]

M1 MBP 8/256, 7 days old, 4,53TBW. Big Sur 11.2.2
kernel_task is the main culprit.
I use it quite heavy, but memory pressure is (almost allways) green.
Apps: Safari with about 20 tabs
Mail
pages
messages
Signal
Telegram
iStat
AlDente
Flux
NordVPN
Finder
AirBuddy
are (almost) allways open

Sometimes open:
TV app
Spotify
Affinity photo
Pixelmator Pro
Chrome
Brave
Firefox
notes
reminders
calendar
Rstudio
Sensei
Terminal
Activity monitor
Coconut battery

How much data written to the SSD and in how long time?

 

[Fomalhaut]

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.

You could have referred them to the Disk activity panel in Activity Monitor. e.g. on my Mini, this is after about 24 hours since reboot with a 13-hour sleep (during which about 20GB were read or written):

Also using the OS utilities `iostat` and `vm_stat` you can get a lot of data, e.g. to see my usage overnight, I ran iostat before I slepts and just now:

% iostat -Id disk0
              disk0
    KB/t xfrs   MB
   63.77 4823629 300388.12

% iostat -Id disk0
              disk0
    KB/t xfrs   MB
   56.51 5799063 320039.48

These are not 3-rd party tools, so maybe Apple would pay more attention to the numbers? I realize that they do not give lifetime totals of SSD writes, but they do indicate the trend if you leave your machine running for several days or weeks.

For reference before I rebooted yesterday morning, I had 3 days uptime, and about 2.6TB written, according to Activity Monitor. This seemed excessive to me. I rebooted and disabled spotlight indexing. It seems to be behaving better now, but I don't know whether this is due to having less swap (I had up to 15GB swap in use before reboot) or whether Spotlight indexing had anything to do with it.

Like you, I would like to know the TBW of my 512GB SSD. I still use my 2011 MacMini (with a patch updater to Catalina, and 3rd party SSDs), and would expect my current M1 Mini to last just as long. Any built-in limit to the lifespan of less than, say, 8 years is unacceptable in my opinion.

 

[souko]

How much data written to the SSD and in how long time?

In 7 days 4,53TB written

 

[Fomalhaut]

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.

That's a good data point. I use Spotify and VSCode all day...

 

[VitoBotta]

You could have referred them to the Disk activity panel in Activity Monitor. e.g. on my Mini, this is after about 24 hours since reboot with a 13-hour sleep (during which about 20GB were read or written):

View attachment 1739454

Also using the OS utilities `iostat` and `vm_stat` you can get a lot of data, e.g. to see my usage overnight, I ran iostat before I slepts and just now:

% iostat -Id disk0
              disk0
    KB/t xfrs   MB
   63.77 4823629 300388.12

% iostat -Id disk0
              disk0
    KB/t xfrs   MB
   56.51 5799063 320039.48

These are not 3-rd party tools, so maybe Apple would pay more attention to the numbers? I realize that they do not give lifetime totals of SSD writes, but they do indicate the trend if you leave your machine running for several days or weeks.

For reference before I rebooted yesterday morning, I had 3 days uptime, and about 2.6TB written, according to Activity Monitor. This seemed excessive to me. I rebooted and disabled spotlight indexing. It seems to be behaving better now, but I don't know whether this is due to having less swap (I had up to 15GB swap in use before reboot) or whether Spotlight indexing had anything to do with it.

Like you, I would like to know the TBW of my 512GB SSD. I still use my 2011 MacMini (with a patch updater to Catalina, and 3rd party SSDs), and would expect my current M1 Mini to last just as long. Any built-in limit to the lifespan of less than, say, 8 years is unacceptable in my opinion.

Disk Utility shows aggregate stats for all the drives and I have 3 external drives, so those numbers aren't very helpful in my case and I prefer the SMART data anyway. I used iostat too, roughly the same numbers as I get with smartmontools. I didn't think mentioning iostat to Apple people though, I should have done that.

My swap is crazy This afternoon it was something like 4-5GB, now it stands at 21.09 GB and I haven't changed anything as far as running apps or else. Boh.

 

[VitoBotta]

In 7 days 4,53TB written

Yeah not as bad as mine but not great either. Now it's a bit better with Spotlight disabled but still... 1 TB in one day.

A big offender is Docker. I have been working with Docker for around 5:30 hours and in that amount of time alone 431 GB were written I have to remember to shut down Docker when I am not working with it. Swap is now at 22.97 GB which is crazy.

 

[Fomalhaut]

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 doubt that the cached items have anything to do with SSD writes, because these are sitting in RAM, and will probably just be deleted rather than written to SSD when memory pressure builds up. Your swap usage is also zero, so very unlikely to involve any SSD activity.

I agree that Apple should listen to "bytes written" from a process, or "Data written" totals in the Activity Monitor. I was getting about 850GB written per day recently.

 

[souko]

Yeah not as bad as mine but not great either. Now it's a bit better with Spotlight disabled but still... 1 TB in one day.

A big offender is Docker. I have been working with Docker for around 5:30 hours and in that amount of time alone 431 GB were written I have to remember to shut down Docker when I am not working with it. Swap is now at 22.97 GB which is crazy.

I have spotlight enabled, swap is 5GB at this moment. Noticed 5GB written during watching 10 min video in Safari.

 

[Fomalhaut]

How can you manage 90 tabs??? 😱

Pretty normal for me too. You divide them between windows for different types of content. Mine are generally "documents" - Confluence Wiki, Google Docs",
"Consoles" - mostly AWS cloud management tabs for various services,
"Reference Docs" - technical documentation pages, APIs etc that I am working with,
"Research" - search results for specific technical issues I'm working on, Stackoverload, Medium etc. and
"Tasks" - Jira & Asana task boards, Google mail, information on my current work in progress or planned tasks, project plans etc.
"Personal" - news, social media etc.

It's easy to get to well over 100 tabs with my workflow.

However, with the concern over excessive swap usage potentially causing my SSD to burn-out, I am going to start using the "Reading List" feature in Safari which hopefully offloads my reference material out of memory while I'm not using it.

 

[VitoBotta]

Pretty normal for me too. You divide them between windows for different types of content. Mine are generally "documents" - Confluence Wiki, Google Docs",
"Consoles" - mostly AWS cloud management tabs for various services,
"Reference Docs" - technical documentation pages, APIs etc that I am working with,
"Research" - search results for specific technical issues I'm working on, Stackoverload, Medium etc. and
"Tasks" - Jira & Asana task boards, Google mail, information on my current work in progress or planned tasks, project plans etc.
"Personal" - news, social media etc.

It's easy to get to well over 100 tabs with my workflow.

However, with the concern over excessive swap usage potentially causing my SSD to burn-out, I am going to start using the "Reading List" feature in Safari which hopefully offloads my reference material out of memory while I'm not using it.

I get lost with more than 10 tabs lol. How do you switch quickly between them?

 

[Fomalhaut]

Yeah not as bad as mine but not great either. Now it's a bit better with Spotlight disabled but still... 1 TB in one day.

A big offender is Docker. I have been working with Docker for around 5:30 hours and in that amount of time alone 431 GB were written I have to remember to shut down Docker when I am not working with it. Swap is now at 22.97 GB which is crazy.

What spec is your machine? 16GB/256GB?

 

[VitoBotta]

What spec is your machine? 16GB/256GB?

Yep

 

[Fomalhaut]

I get lost with more than 10 tabs lol. How do you switch quickly between them?

Command-Tab & Command-`

I have two screens and also use work-spaces Desktops sometimes. 6 windows isn't too many, and the Safari Tab Overview makes it easy to identify the content of each tab, but I generally remember where I left things....

 

[VitoBotta]

Command-Tab & Command-`

I have two screens and also use work-spaces sometimes. 6 windows isn't too many, and the Safari Tab Overview makes it easy to identify the content of each tab, but I generally remember where I left things....

How do you find a tab among many in the same window? I know that there is an Alfred workflow for that

 

[Fomalhaut]

Yeah not as bad as mine but not great either. Now it's a bit better with Spotlight disabled but still... 1 TB in one day.

A big offender is Docker. I have been working with Docker for around 5:30 hours and in that amount of time alone 431 GB were written I have to remember to shut down Docker when I am not working with it. Swap is now at 22.97 GB which is crazy.

Off-topic, but how well is Docker running on Apple Silicon now? Just for ARM images or using QEMU or similar for x86 images?

Is this native or via Rosetta? How did you install it?

Thanks!

 

[Baff]

How can you manage 90 tabs??? 😱

I generally have them split between 2 or 3 windows and sorted by subject(work, games, tv, shopping, etc). Many of the pages are only open for reference and only get reloaded when I reboot. Someone earlier in the thread said they had 500+ tabs open.

 

[Fomalhaut]

How do you find a tab among many in the same window? I know that there is an Alfred workflow for that

The "Tab Overview" icon in the top-right of Safari. I don't normally have more than 20-30 tabs in a Safari window, so it's easy enough to find the tab visually.


 

[Baff]

I get lost with more than 10 tabs lol. How do you switch quickly between them?

I use Command-Shift-Left/Right to quickly scroll through the various tabs, hitting Command-R to reload when needed.

I also use Home, End, Page Up/Down, and arrow keys to quickly navigate webpages. Tab comes in handy for filling in forms. I also use the mouse and scroll wheel, but that is often slower than the keyboard.

I've been a hardcore gamer for 40+ years, so it all seems fairly natural to me.

 

[Gustavo Carvalh]

Turning off iCloud Drive seems to have helped here (MBA 8/256). Not ideal, but the amount of written data was crazy when compared to my intel macbook.