ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

[Mike Boreham]

Trust me you do not need to do this!

https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...red-to-install-and-boot-usb-external.2279421/

I can't see wherein that article Howard says need to reduce security.

I have done several installs on to externals with standard security.

Note that the Startup Security options for T2 Macs DO specifically mention booting from externals:

But the Startup Security options on M1 Macs do not not mention external booting, and it is not required, at least for an external that you yourself create on the Mac you want to boot:

NB not a screen shot of my M1 MBA settings:

 

[MacModMachine]

Nov 28 to Mar 15 = 107 days with 20.8 TB (1%). ~0.269 TB/day with a projected drive TBW of 2080 at the end of 10,700 days. That is 29.3 years. Explain to me again why everyone is freaking out?

i was hoping to get 60 years out of it....disappointed , i was going to pass this on in family generations to come.

 

[Spudlicious]

i was hoping to get 60 years out of it....disappointed , i was going to pass this on in family generations to come.

This is good. Future nosey-parkers won't be able to rummage through our files and see what we were downloading.

 

[jterp7]

i was hoping to get 60 years out of it....disappointed , i was going to pass this on in family generations to come.

so just joining this thread...is that an 8gb machine and is so does that necessarily mean that for 16gb its twice the lifetime or do we have to factor the ram to ssd ratio here?

 

[mi7chy]

Explain to me again why everyone is freaking out?

When it dies 3 months after release or 200 power on hours.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1366131394297012226

 

[IceStormNG]

When it dies 3 months after release or 200 power on hours.

Wait.. there are already cases where the M1 SSDs are completely trashed?

600TB in 4 months is insane. That's 5TB a day, or about 3.5GiB per Minute if you assume it to be spread evenly across 24h.
If you assume 8h per day then it's a bit over 10GiB per minute or 178MiB/s "constantly".

 

[jterp7]

what apps are these people using?

 

[MacModMachine]

Wait.. there are already cases where the M1 SSDs are completely trashed?

600TB in 4 months is insane. That's 5TB a day, or about 3.5GiB per Minute if you assume it to be spread evenly across 24h.
If you assume 8h per day then it's a bit over 10GiB per minute or 178MiB/s "constantly".

that's 850mb/s for those 200 hours....crazy

 

[Spudlicious]

When it dies 3 months after release or 200 power on hours.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1366131394297012226

One tweet (he hasn't mentioned it since) about one M1 Mac from someone who knows someone. Let me mention someone (it's me) who's had an M1 Mac slightly more than two months and who hasn't hit the 1TBW mark yet. Yes I'm a light user of that Mac and many others have reported much higher TBW figures, but a general SSD problem with M1 machines? A problem likely to result in widespread SSD failures? Really? We all have to be prepared to eat our words sometimes, but I'm still confident.

 

[MacModMachine]

One tweet (he hasn't mentioned it since) about one M1 Mac from someone who knows someone. Let me mention someone (it's me) who's had an M1 Mac slightly more than two months and who hasn't hit the 1TBW mark yet. Yes I'm a light user of that Mac and many others have reported much higher TBW figures, but a general SSD problem with M1 machines? A problem likely to result in widespread SSD failures? Really? We all have to be prepared to eat our words sometimes, but I'm still confident.

you better get some ketchup for those words.....your going to be eating them soon.

 

[mi7chy]

One tweet (he hasn't mentioned it since) about one M1 Mac from someone who knows someone. Let me mention someone (it's me) who's had an M1 Mac slightly more than two months and who hasn't hit the 1TBW mark yet. Yes I'm a light user of that Mac and many others have reported much higher TBW figures, but a general SSD problem with M1 machines? A problem likely to result in widespread SSD failures? Really? We all have to be prepared to eat our words sometimes, but I'm still confident.

Savvy consumers understand the concept of worst case vs best case. His isn't even worst case since it's 512GB SSD. If 512GB died after 500TB TBW then 256GB, like mine, which has about half the endurance can die at ~250TB TBW. Fortunately, I have other devices I can use in the meantime while waiting for a fix otherwise might offload it or trade for 48" LG C1 OLED or AMD Ryzen 5800U/5600U laptop.

 

[mi7chy]

Wait.. there are already cases where the M1 SSDs are completely trashed?

600TB in 4 months is insane. That's 5TB a day, or about 3.5GiB per Minute if you assume it to be spread evenly across 24h.
If you assume 8h per day then it's a bit over 10GiB per minute or 178MiB/s "constantly".

He actually flipped his TBR and TBW around so it's actually 511.9TB TBW. The product launched 11/17/2020 and it died 2/28/2021 so just shy of four months. Still early so we have to wait for more reports.

 

[Spudlicious]

you better get some ketchup for those words.....your going to be eating them soon.

Mayonnaise for me, but I won’t take it out the fridge yet. You may be proven right, but I really think that four months+ into the M1 era this would be bigger story and a bigger stink if there was a fundamental problem.

 

[MacModMachine]

Mayonnaise for me, but I won’t take it out the fridge yet. You may be proven right, but I really think that four months+ into the M1 era this would be bigger story and a bigger stink if there was a fundamental problem.

yea , its going to depend entirely on use cases , but mine is a light workload , I have amassed 20tb , which is not really that much. 10years it should last at this rate , which would be plenty. but I could easily see a moderate photo editing workload really ramp that up and bring it down to a few years...who knows without more data. I got apple care anyway. when that runs out this goes out the window and a new one comes in with AppleCare again.

never failed me doing business this way

 

[Never mind]

 

[Mc0]

Hey guys, can you look into my DriveDx stat if this is normal? I got my work laptop back from service last Friday. They had to replace the board and SSD because of water damage. It's an Intel MBP 2017 13" 8/256. I downloaded DriveDx just to check the health of the new drive and this is what I got. I'm a software engineer. I use VS code, Github, Python and MongoDB/MySQL. I don't do media/photo editing. I've only been using it for 2 days to setup my local environment but not sure how it's already taken up 2TBW. I disabled Time machine. Spotlight is enabled for folders, documents, spreadsheet and PDF. iCloud Drive is disabled. I don't put my laptop to sleep. I always shut it down after work. Latest version of Big Sur installed.

 

[CMMChris]

Your stats are completely normal.

 

[IceStormNG]

Hey guys, can you look into my DriveDx stat if this is normal? I got my work laptop back from service last Friday. They had to replace the board and SSD because of water damage. It's an Intel MBP 2017 13" 8/256. I downloaded DriveDx just to check the health of the new drive and this is what I got. I'm a software engineer. I use VS code, Github, Python and MongoDB/MySQL. I don't do media/photo editing. I've only been using it for 2 days to setup my local environment but not sure how it's already taken up 2TBW. I disabled Time machine. Spotlight is enabled for folders, documents, spreadsheet and PDF. iCloud Drive is disabled. I don't put my laptop to sleep. I always shut it down after work. Latest version of Big Sur installed.

View attachment 1744266

Looks fine to me. Installing the OS and all the software does a lot of writes. The SSD might also already got written by Apple for testing purpose.

Depending on usage, it's pretty normal to get spikes in TBW. You only have a problem if it is constantly high without you doing anything write heavy.

If you do Final Cut editing on it and have background render on, then of course it will write a lot. Compiling larger code bases can also cause writes spikes.

The problem some people are facing is that something unknowingly writes tons of data the whole time.

A few TB here and there is not an issue. Modern SSDs can take a lot of writes. But consumer SSDs are not designed to regularly eat a few TB per day.

 

[MacModMachine]

Your stats are completely normal.

aside from the power cycle count...has to be wrong. 2200 Times in less than 48 hours...haha

 

[Maximara]

When it dies 3 months after release or 200 power on hours.

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1366131394297012226

What on earth are they running on that machine?!

 

[MacModMachine]

What on earth are they running on that machine?!

it was the postgres server for a bank

 

[pibefision]

Is there any evidence of the same issue hapenning on Intel Macs? If Big Sur is the issue, Apple should state something.
I've an M1, 72hs of usage.

Installed and setup everything to develop on Rails. Is this normal?

 

[Quackers]

Here's my DriveDX stats. Is this the whole history of my SSD from its beginning?
I've had this M1 Air for just short of 6 weeks and for various experimenting reasons I've re-installed macOS 4 times. So you'd expect plenty of writes in that respect.
Apart from a Parallels WoA installation my use case is very light - just browsing, foruming and the odd HD/4K video.


Obviously the power cycle and unsafe shutdowns info is wrong.
For a system that's had 4 re-installs and almost 6 weeks use 900GB of disk writes does not seem that much to me.
The machine is almost never shut down and sleeps every night.
16/512GB SSD.

 

[Kyros_G]

I'm thinking of giving OnyX a try.

Any advice on its settings or just Maintenance tab >> Run tasks?

 

[telo123]

How's everyone writes with the 11.3 dev/public beta 4 release?