ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

[ambient_light]

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

I guess Apple has changed something in the VM behavior, "swappiness" seems to be less aggressive. At least vm_stat is showing a lot of zeros, and kernel_task is not writing like crazy. More testing time is needed to come to the definite conclusion though.

 

[TheSynchronizer]

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.
View attachment 1744337
View attachment 1744338
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.

This is an incredibly low amount of disk writes for 6 weeks of use and 4 reinstalls!?
It almost seems like DriveDx isn’t reporting the correct number.

That being said, you do have 16GB ram, and maybe your reinstalls indeed fixed the write bug so you never had the write issue. But even so, that is an incredibly low write count. nevertheless, nice to see for a change

Are we sure DriveDx is working correctly on these M1 Macs? Is there any chance the data written value would reset on a system reinstall?

 

[telo123]

I guess Apple has changed something in the VM behavior, "swappiness" seems to be less aggressive. At least vm_stat is showing a lot of zeros, and kernel_task is not writing like crazy. More testing time is needed to come to the definite conclusion though.

If you don't mind, please keep us updated with your observations for the next couple of days.
I don't want to install beta on mine because it's the only Mac with me now 😅

 

[Quackers]

This is an incredibly low amount of disk writes for 6 weeks of use and 4 reinstalls!?
It almost seems like DriveDx isn’t reporting the correct number.

That being said, you do have 16GB ram, and maybe your reinstalls indeed fixed the write bug so you never had the write issue. But even so, that is an incredibly low write count. nevertheless, nice to see for a change

Are we sure DriveDx is working correctly on these M1 Macs? Is there any chance the data written value would reset on a system reinstall?

Yes, mine's almost new compared to some of the horrendous numbers I've seen quoted in this thread.
(By the way, the re-installs were to experiment with the various methods currently and previously available, to see which worked and which didn't).
Mine's never seemed to be writing too much to disk as I've been keeping an eye on things all along, having seen this thread. But having said that, apart from installing 2 vm's in Parallels and re-installing one, together with normal light use, I wouldn't have expected to see high numbers.
Mind you, not many others in this thread would have expected it either, perhaps.
Certainly some of DriveDX's numbers are not accurate in my view but maybe they don't actually mean what I think they mean
Power on time, power cycles etc etc appear to be dubious imho.
Also I have never had TM backups running at all. I connect a drive and backup using TM manually when I need to.

 

[CMMChris]

@pibefision @Quackers All fine with your stats. Nothing to worry about.

 

[wirtandi]

The Macbook M1 SSD first casualty reported

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

concerns me. All this time people have been saying not to worry etc but there you go, the first real world casualty.

On the flipside, 11.3 may have fixed this issue finally......?

 

[telo123]

On the flipside, 11.3 may have fixed this issue finally......?

It's too soon to say now.

Casual users shouldn't be reaching that high amount of Writes (>600 TB) in the example you gave. By casual I mean you're just web-browsing and doing office tasks. Nothing to worry about for them.

For "Pro" users, yeah, I'd be concerned. Soon all of Adobe apps will be updated. Those who use DaVinci should update as soon as possible because it has been updated to be universal. Some do suspect that Rosetta 2 can influence high writes to the SSD. A reddit post did say that when they changed from using desktop non-universal apps to the WebApp via Chrome/Edge for things like Teams, Discord, and WhatsApp, their writes decreased significantly.

I'm assuming "Pro" Users can say that most of their apps haven't been updated yet to the masses, especially those who use very niche apps that updates take longer, etc.

 

[Fomalhaut]

November 21 to March 14 is 113 days or ~0.119 TB/day. The SSD Endurance Experiment: They’re all dead puts this in prospective. Using the worst number (200TB) gets us 1680 days or 4.6 years. More than enough time to get an external SSD, boot from that, and continue on your merry way.

Yes...but being forced to boot from an external SSD after 5 years of ownership is not exactly a ringing endorsement of quality and reliability, is it? It's a workaround for a failed system, but hardly an acceptable solution.

 

[IceStormNG]

Yes...but being forced to boot from an external SSD after 5 years of ownership is not exactly a ringing endorsement of quality and reliability, is it? It's a workaround for a failed system, but hardly an acceptable solution.

Apple probably wants you to buy a new Mac every 2 years....

When the disk fails, for whatever reason, you're screwed anyway. Well... If anything fails, you're screwed if you're not under warranty anymore. Soldering the SSD was just done because of pure greed anyway. There's not real technical reason for this. NVMe blades are very small.

 

[Silvestru Hosszu]

I just did a test related to whatsapp. My M1 has no excessive writes, in 60hours uptime it wrote less than 10gb.
What is interesting is that when I started whatsapp (the app not in the browser) I saw a spike in writing. Kernel_task wrote 1gb in 5 minutes! After I quit the program, everything went normal.
I am attaching a screenshot. See the red spikes in the activity monitor.

 

[k-hawinkler]

BTW

Read/Write speed comparison of the internal SSD of
1TB late 2013 Mac Pro: READ ~830 MB/s, WRITE ~830-980 MB/s
2TB 2020 M1 Mac mini: READ ~2900 MB/s, WRITE ~2720-3020 MB/s
as recorded by Blackmagic Disk Speed Test.

Well, quite an improvement and noticeable in daily use! I like it!

Anybody wonder why the new M1 Macs can fill up their SSD in hurry?

 

[Tev11]

I just did a test related to whatsapp. My M1 has no excessive writes, in 60hours uptime it wrote less than 10gb.
What is interesting is that when I started whatsapp (the app not in the browser) I saw a spike in writing. Kernel_task wrote 1gb in 5 minutes! After I quit the program, everything went normal.
I am attaching a screenshot. See the red spikes in the activity monitor.

It is reasonable due to Rosetta 2. It has to write stuff to the SSD to emulate/translate it to run on Apple Silicon. Obviously, if it becomes universal, Rosetta 2 doesn’t need to run anymore. Unless the desktop app has essential features that you can’t live without, I recommend to continue using Chromium Browsers and save it to the dock as a Web-App.

 

[Spindel]

BTW to you people comparing activity monitor writes to DriveDX or smrtctl results and concluding the changes reported by both activity monitor and DriveDX are the same I have this piece of information.

They are the same for me too, but some of my writes are to my NAS and somehow DriveDX picks them up as writes to my SSD.

As I said before: Do not trust these tools, you have no idea where they pull data from.

 

[qap]

At the moment only workaround I've found is to turn off instead of sleep, or I'm using a stupid "Quit all" app, saved as Workflow, that I recall with a command-\ shortcut that quit all my open apps (not the menubar items).

Ony my iMac I keep always open Safari/Mail/Reeder but this behavior on ARM Macs keeps the Mac to sync bookmarks/check the mails/etc... and it writes all of these to disk. Same thing on intel Macs results in no disk activity.

Hope for the 11.3 🤞 beta testers report your feedbacks, thanks!

 

[crucifixx]

My machine : Mac Mini M1 8GB/256GB - The very basic one.

So I've made a chart of how many TB was written for every single day. I decided on having Power On Hours on the X-axis rather than days apart because it's more accurate this way. Each data points here are taken roughly one day apart.

As you can see it was pretty bad in the beginning where it can add almost 1 TBW in like 5 hours of power on.

Things started to change for the better around 62 Hours, this is the point where I did a few things, so I'm not sure which one really helped me but it must be one of these things:

• Switched browser from Safari to Edge
• Substitute any Electron/Regular apps that runs on Rosetta 2 (Discord, Whatsapp, Microsoft Teams, and Figma) and open them in Microsoft Edge instead. These are the apps that I use heavily. Right now the only app I run that is still on Rosetta 2 is Logi Options since there's no way around that.
• I don't do Time Machine backups but I added my drive in the excluded list in the Time Machine settings.

So from that point on kernel_task starts to write less than before. Now after 3 days or so of uptime, it only writes 56GB to the disk instead of 300-400 in a single day.

Swap also becomes manageable and it maxes out at 2GB now. Previously it was over 10GB of swap.

 

[k-hawinkler]

Thanks, very nice work.

 

[badsimian]

Just updating from having turned off time machine the other day (not excluding the drive, actually turn off automatic backups and make sure no drives listed as targets)

I am looking at 73GB written by kernel task over the past 4 days, I used to get 100-200GB/day. Nothing else has changed, I use safari a lot as well as Edge. I use electron apps - VSCode, Spotify, WhatsApp & Signal.

 

[qap]

Just updating from having turned off time machine the other day (not excluding the drive, actually turn off automatic backups and make sure no drives listed as targets)

I am looking at 73GB written by kernel task over the past 4 days, I used to get 100-200GB/day. Nothing else has changed, I use safari a lot as well as Edge. I use electron apps - VSCode, Spotify, WhatsApp & Signal.

Time Machine writes to another disk (yes with kernel_task) so it’s normal but TM shouldn’t wear out the internal SSD

 

[badsimian]

Time Machine writes to another disk (yes with kernel_task) so it’s normal but TM shouldn’t wear out the internal SSD

Depends on the mechanics of how it determines change, with APFS snapshots in play etc. All I can say is what I have observed, completely ditching Time Machine has fixed it for me. As in the kernel bytes written did correlate with the same amount of increase in TBW coming back from SMART info. Now the kernel bytes written has dropped completely, so has the TBW reported by SMART, so even though as you say it is writing to another drive, something about this process was hitting the internal SSD.

 

[Burebista]

I also had the problem, that the command was not found. Someone pointed out I should use the full path instead:

/usr/local/sbin/smartctl --all /dev/disk0

That worked for me.

Thanks a lot!

Here is what I got, this is exactly 1 month of use, base M1 Air:


SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)


Critical Warning: 0x00


Temperature: 27 Celsius


Available Spare: 100%


Available Spare Threshold: 99%


Percentage Used: 0%


Data Units Read: 2,088,327 [1.06 TB]


Data Units Written: 1,233,634 [631 GB]


Host Read Commands: 34,518,885


Host Write Commands: 15,268,688


Controller Busy Time: 0


Power Cycles: 95


Power On Hours: 19


Unsafe Shutdowns: 5


Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0


Error Information Log Entries: 0

 

[wyk126]

It is reasonable due to Rosetta 2. It has to write stuff to the SSD to emulate/translate it to run on Apple Silicon. Obviously, if it becomes universal, Rosetta 2 doesn’t need to run anymore. Unless the desktop app has essential features that you can’t live without, I recommend to continue using Chromium Browsers and save it to the dock as a Web-App.

Is it possible to save as a webapp in the doc from Edge? I'm struggling to find how to do it. thanks

 

[Idec50]

it was the postgres server for a bank

That's a joke, right?

 

[badsimian]

Is it possible to save as a webapp in the doc from Edge? I'm struggling to find how to do it. thanks

The site has got to support it. If it does you will see an icon like this at the end of the address bar, click it.

Outlook on web supports this for instance.

 

[Maximara]

Soldering the SSD was just done because of pure greed anyway.

No is is NOT "pure greed" As I said in another thread:

To everyone moaning and groaning about Apple using soldered RAM and SSDs read The scourge of fully soldered and non-upgradeable laptops.

"First and possibly foremost is manufacturing efficiency, which includes both quality control and cost reduction. Every additional removable piece, especially including a SODIMM slot, introduces more cost and another potential fail point. Plus, an actual RAM socket requires an actual human being be there to plug a RAM chip into every laptop that goes down the assembly line, further adding to cost.

More pertinent, though, is the fact soldered RAM can be placed just about wherever engineers decide. With proper research and development, this can lead to streamlined mainboard design as well as increased thermal efficiency. It also means there's no need to include a bulky connector or an access door, and all told, these benefits combine to let laptop designers shave millimeters off case thickness"

 

[Tev11]

Is it possible to save as a webapp in the doc from Edge? I'm struggling to find how to do it. thanks

Yes.

On any website, go to the “3 dots” to open the drop-down menu. Go to “Apps” and “Install this Site as an App.” This opens the app on a new window.

It will then save the App as a shortcut to a folder “Edge Apps.” It will also appear on Launchpad. You are free to change the icon to a customized icon.

If you do not want the app to open a new window, but instead a new Tab on Edge, go to the 3 Dots > More Tools > Pin to Finder.

It will save an “App” like before, but it will open a New Tab on your current Edge, instead of a new Window.