ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

[wirtandi]

As some of you may know I have been postponing my purchase of a MBA M1 for ages because of this SSD issue. Yesterday i went to a store to play around with it and I found the activity monitor and straight away i remember this thread, so i looked at the "kernel_task".

My question is, which kernel_task should i be looking at? If i remember correctly, in activity monitor, there are 4 tabs - disk, memory, network and something else. each tab has its own kernel_task. which tab should i be looking at in relation to this SSD issue? and what is a healthy number to see?

hope someone can help me here as i plan to go to a local store again to have a look. thanks in advance

 

[jdb8167]

As some of you may know I have been postponing my purchase of a MBA M1 for ages because of this SSD issue. Yesterday i went to a store to play around with it and I found the activity monitor and straight away i remember this thread, so i looked at the "kernel_task".

My question is, which kernel_task should i be looking at? If i remember correctly, in activity monitor, there are 4 tabs - disk, memory, network and something else. each tab has its own kernel_task. which tab should i be looking at in relation to this SSD issue? and what is a healthy number to see?

hope someone can help me here as i plan to go to a local store again to have a look. thanks in advance

They are all the same process. The tabs are just different views on system parameters. You can actually edit the columns on any tab to view values from a different tab.

If you are concerned about the SSD write problem you should look at the disk tab. You can see the total writes since boot. Unfortunately this probably won’t be that useful since Apple probably reboots the machines frequently.

 

[leons]

As some of you may know I have been postponing my purchase of a MBA M1 for ages because of this SSD issue. Yesterday i went to a store to play around with it and I found the activity monitor and straight away i remember this thread, so i looked at the "kernel_task".

My question is, which kernel_task should i be looking at? If i remember correctly, in activity monitor, there are 4 tabs - disk, memory, network and something else. each tab has its own kernel_task. which tab should i be looking at in relation to this SSD issue? and what is a healthy number to see?

hope someone can help me here as i plan to go to a local store again to have a look. thanks in advance

Don't wait. The positive impact this wonderful machine will have on your computing life is orders-of-magnitude greater than the minor adjustments you might temporarily need to make until Apple adjusts MacOS. The temporary solutions (if you even need them) are all here in this thread. The only thing you should be "testing" at the Apple store is which color you like!

 

[wirtandi]

Don't wait. The positive impact this wonderful machine will have on your computing life is orders-of-magnitude greater than the minor adjustments you might temporarily need to make until Apple adjusts MacOS. The temporary solutions (if you even need them) are all here in this thread. The only thing you should be "testing" at the Apple store is which color you like!

Thank you for the positivity.....but my concern is that Apple ignores this issue (if it does turn out to be an issue) until it is already too late.

Sigh....if only apple could say something, anything at all about this...would put millions of people's minds at ease........

Seriously, this ssd issue is the ONLY thing keeping me from buying this beautiful product.

 

[Thistle41]

Sounds like it's worth giving a try, thanks!

+1 to this, I've made comments in this thread before on my observations that there seems to be some sort of write loop bug during sleep that has been introduced with Big Sur.

As far as what I've done to reduce the writes on my M1 system during sleep to a minimum, is I've set ttyskeepawake to 0 and tcpkeepalive to 0 in pmset in terminal which essentially turns off networking 2 minutes into sleep instead of keeping them on as is set by default.

This is done by doing sudo pmset -a ttyskeepawake 0 ,then the same for the latter.

I've found this has not affected the functioning of my system at all, everything is syncing and updated on wake as it's always been, but it has essentially reduced my system from writing anywhere up to 8GB during sleep, to around 0.5GB.

OK, I tried this overnight and it went from 53Gb to 64Gb for a period of 13 Hours. I did get the warning about the FindMYMac would be a problem so as I did this through an admin account are these flags Global?

Uptime is 2 days 15Hr with 64Gb written. 18.9 TBW from smartmontools

(I Shoulda said MBA 256/8 M1 bought 2nd hand end of Jan 2021 only 8 power cycles on purchase and age in Battery app is 7.1 months)

 

[Isamilis]

Hi guys, I have my Macbook M1 (basic version) for ~3 weeks and I have 4.12TB Data Units Read and 2.69TB Data Units Written. Is that a lot? I struggle to find what the normal usage should be.

My intel MBA 2020, have 4 TB as well, light usage since Aug last year.

 

[Thistle41]

My intel MBA 2020, have 4 TB as well, light usage since Aug last year.

Well, mine averages out at 2.67TBW/month so very similar to @afdkj quoted. However, I would hope that this goes down a long way with the tweaks I've done and/or Apple updates.

 

[MrGunny94]

Well, mine averages out at 2.67TBW/month so very similar to @afdkj quoted. However, I would hope that this goes down a long way with the tweaks I've done and/or Apple updates.

Shouldn't be a big issue moving forward tbh

 

[TheSynchronizer]

OK, I tried this overnight and it went from 53Gb to 64Gb for a period of 13 Hours. I did get the warning about the FindMYMac would be a problem so as I did this through an admin account are these flags Global?

Uptime is 2 days 15Hr with 64Gb written. 18.9 TBW from smartmontools

(I Shoulda said MBA 256/8 M1 bought 2nd hand end of Jan 2021 only 8 power cycles on purchase and age in Battery app is 7.1 months)

I assume you did ‘sudo pmset -a ttyskeepawake 0’ which should be admin so global. Weird to see your writes still increasing, some things to try/note
1) Is there an improvement when you try sleeping as normal but after rebooting?
2) ‘pmset -g assertions’ shows you if anything is preventing sleep, worth checking if something is not letting it sleep when you close the lid.
3) ‘standby 1’ is supposed to write your RAM contents to disk after 3 hours when sleeping (I set this to 0 on power and kept it as 1 on battery). Maybe this is responsible?

Interesting to see that you had writes that resembled the mac not being asleep. Personally mine reduced by magnitudes during sleep so I’m not sure why that could be for me and not for you.

Regardless all these pmset settings are harmless to experiment with and if you see no improvements then you can just set them back to default anyway. And 11GB over 13 hours, although high for a ‘sleeping’ mac, atleast isn’t really high enough to be problematic anyway. The problem would be if you saw these sorts of writes every time you slept the mac during the day, as that could quickly add up.

Best of luck!

 

[chouseworth]

Thank you for the positivity.....but my concern is that Apple ignores this issue (if it does turn out to be an issue) until it is already too late.

Sigh....if only apple could say something, anything at all about this...would put millions of people's minds at ease........

Seriously, this ssd issue is the ONLY thing keeping me from buying this beautiful product.

There have been very real, concrete suggestions in this forum to mitigate the problem down from hundreds of gigs a day to much less. Very few are now seeing writes that will crater their disks over a 5-6 year span. I would not hesitate to buy another one, but that’s me. You are obviously transfixed by this issue, and probably should not buy as all you are going to be doing is running activity monitor or smartmontools multiple times a day obsessing over your writes. It’s a tool, and yes it is to be used and enjoyed, not feared. But get used to the fact that Apple is not saying much. They may never say much about it. But I am certain that the issue has their attention.

 

[Thistle41]

OK thanks, I've attached some dumps of the pmset side of things. Looks like a few things keeping it awake, 2 mail apps as there are 2 accounts logged in I expect. Keyboard will be inactive after 240 seconds. Not sure what pid78 is?

I've rebooted and will be monitoring the disk activity. Thanks for any ideas you may have.

 

[TheSynchronizer]

OK thanks, I've attached some dumps of the pmset side of things. Looks like a few things keeping it awake, 2 mail apps as there are 2 accounts logged in I expect. Keyboard will be inactive after 240 seconds. Not sure what pid78 is?

I've rebooted and will be monitoring the disk activity. Thanks for any ideas you may have.


View attachment 1750400 View attachment 1750399

Yes so it does indeed seem like your mac is being kept awake by some processes. Do check if they continue to stick around after reboot too.

My advice to you is, if your overall writes (including your normal use of the system) divided by your overall uptime (found by typing 'uptime' in terminal) is less than 5GB / hour, then i'd say it's a non issue. Averaging 5GB/hr or less on a modern SSD like this will give you years of use into the territory where something else is more likely to fail rather than the SSD regardless.

That all being said, I'm attaching what things look like on my side. Interestingly, my sleep was supposedly being stopped by Handoff, so I disabled and re-enabled it and now it no longer says that it's preventing sleep. I've potentially stumbled upon a bug here and I'm going to check if Handoff starts preventing sleep again later.

 

[leons]

There have been very real, concrete suggestions in this forum to mitigate the problem down from hundreds of gigs a day to much less. Very few are now seeing writes that will crater their disks over a 5-6 year span. I would not hesitate to buy another one, but that’s me. You are obviously transfixed by this issue, and probably should not buy as all you are going to be doing is running activity monitor or smartmontools multiple times a day obsessing over your writes. It’s a tool, and yes it is to be used and enjoyed, not feared. But get used to the fact that Apple is not saying much. They may never say much about it. But I am certain that the issue has their attention.

As a way of putting this in perspective: I was probably the worse case here. Before discovering this thread, I was going through 1TB+/day and not even knowing it. By using the methods here (with special mention to @TheSynchronizer),
I am now down to less than 25GB/day. More importantly, nothing has changed with regard to my day-to-day use as a result of the adjustments. In fact, some have improved with the knowledge I have gained. So, I (personally) really don't care if Apple fixes it or not (except in how a fix would help others). However, for those who are less affected or have at least made some adjustments, you have nothing to worry about. Assume the 5GB/hour mentioned several times above. Then, worse case, assume you use your machine 24x7. So, 5GBx24hoursx365days/year=43.8TB/year. The 256GB drive in the base Air is rated at 1600TBW. Since that's what the manufacturer states, it's probably going to last more. 1600TB/43.8TB/year=36.5+ years. Then, you can pass it on to your grandkids.

 

[Muzosh2]

I have been awaiting macrumors account registrations confirmation email, but didnt receive any even after couple of resend requests, so I might be posting this a little late.

Other sleep problem:
Since I first saw in this thread that this issue might be connected with macbooks waking up from sleeps, I immediately remembered about my problem I was dealing with when I got my macbook air m1 (8gb ram). My problem was that during sleep, there were hundreds of wake requests into "dark wake" state. Because of this I was losing about 2-3 % of battery every night, which wasn't that big of a deal, but I didn't want my macbook to constantly eat battery cycles.

So I started looking through answers on forums, but there were not much people with similar problems. Finally I found this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252061187. Please take a few minutes and read through it, especially posts by me (Muzosh) and other user chrisia777.

TL;DR: Run 2 commands sudo pmset -a tcpkeepalive 0 and sudo pmset -a powernap 0 and disable "Wake for network access" to solve frequent waking up from sleep (Find my mac might not be working properly, but other than that, no other issues, waking from sleep is still instant - besides, who needs Find my mac during global pandemic, right?*irony*).

I've thanked chrisia777 for his solution and described the results here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252061187?answerId=254491680022#254491680022

Why am I posting this?
I'm starting to raise suspicions that these problem could be related since a few people here posted informations about writing high data usage during macbook sleeping. So I would like to raise awareness by posting this.

My data usage?
Another thing that could lead to these two problems being related:
I have obtained my macbook on mid December and issued those two commands late January. I use my macbook air (8gb ram) relatively heavily, but I also like my system clean and efficient. I do programming in IntelliJ, but I close safari tabs I don't use (or bookmark them). I do my management and office tasks on macbook, but cmd+Q calculator after I use it. You get the picture. My max swap memory was about 3 GB, normally about 0,5-1GB.

So far (from mid December), smartctl is reporting 3.22 TBW.

PS: If majority of you think this post is completely irrelevant, I'm sorry. I feel free to delete/archive it.

 

[leons]

I have been awaiting macrumors account registrations confirmation email, but didnt receive any even after couple of resend requests, so I might be posting this a little late.

Other sleep problem:
Since I first saw in this thread that this issue might be connected with macbooks waking up from sleeps, I immediately remembered about my problem I was dealing with when I got my macbook air m1 (8gb ram). My problem was that during sleep, there were hundreds of wake requests into "dark wake" state. Because of this I was losing about 2-3 % of battery every night, which wasn't that big of a deal, but I didn't want my macbook to constantly eat battery cycles.

So I started looking through answers on forums, but there were not much people with similar problems. Finally I found this thread: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252061187. Please take a few minutes and read through it, especially posts by me (Muzosh) and other user chrisia777.

TL;DR: Run 2 commands sudo pmset -a tcpkeepalive 0 and sudo pmset -a powernap 0 and disable "Wake for network access" to solve frequent waking up from sleep (Find my mac might not be working properly, but other than that, no other issues, waking from sleep is still instant - besides, who needs Find my mac during global pandemic, right?*irony*).

I've thanked chrisia777 for his solution and described the results here: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/252061187?answerId=254491680022#254491680022

Why am I posting this?
I'm starting to raise suspicions that these problem could be related since a few people here posted informations about writing high data usage during macbook sleeping. So I would like to raise awareness by posting this.

My data usage?
Another thing that could lead to these two problems being related:
I have obtained my macbook on mid December and issued those two commands late January. I use my macbook air (8gb ram) relatively heavily, but I also like my system clean and efficient. I do programming in IntelliJ, but I close safari tabs I don't use (or bookmark them). I do my management and office tasks on macbook, but cmd+Q calculator after I use it. You get the picture. My max swap memory was about 3 GB, normally about 0,5-1GB.

So far (from mid December), smartctl is reporting 3.22 TBW.

PS: If majority of you think this post is completely irrelevant, I'm sorry. I feel free to delete/archive it.

Yes, most of this has been discussed in this thread, but more info/data points/said a different way is always helpful and welcome. Glad you got it under control. Welcome to the forum!

 

[pibefision]

I still cannot believe this is a problem and I'am not willing to change the way I work just for safety reasons.

In my view, it is unbelivable that Apple didn't say anything about this, in fact, nobody knows which is the maximum TBW of this disks.

I'am returning my M1 Air now. I'am lucky because I can do it in my country without any problem, but this is not a thing I like to do.

I will reconsider the purchase once Apple says something about this (and also about the USBC dongle mess...)

 

[jdb8167]

I still cannot believe this is a problem and I'am not willing to change the way I work just for safety reasons.

In my view, it is unbelivable that Apple didn't say anything about this, in fact, nobody knows which is the maximum TBW of this disks.

I'am returning my M1 Air now. I'am lucky because I can do it in my country without any problem, but this is not a thing I like to do.

I will reconsider the purchase once Apple says something about this (and also about the USBC dongle mess...)

Have you checked to see if your normal work causes the issue? Mine doesn't and a lot of others aren't seeing any problems either. Some people are overreacting too. They see 50GB a day and think that this will limit the lifespan of the Mac. It won't. At 50GB/day you can go 30 years even if the TBW spec is only 600 TB.

There are some people who are seeing on the order of 500GB/day and that is definitely a problem in my opinion. Now you are talking 3 years at 600 TBW which is too little in my book. Apple could reassure us by telling us that the TBW is 1000TBW or 1500TBW but so far they haven't said anything except one anonymous spokesperson telling a rumor site who claimed it was the tools not working correctly but they disappeared and there has been nothing since.

 

[leons]

I still cannot believe this is a problem and I'am not willing to change the way I work just for safety reasons.

In my view, it is unbelivable that Apple didn't say anything about this, in fact, nobody knows which is the maximum TBW of this disks.

I'am returning my M1 Air now. I'am lucky because I can do it in my country without any problem, but this is not a thing I like to do.

I will reconsider the purchase once Apple says something about this (and also about the USBC dongle mess...)

Based on your initial post in this thread, you don't have the problem. For a new machine that needs to download/update, your numbers were well within expected spec. While I respectfully disagree with your reasoning, to each his/her own. However, are you sure you even have the problem?

 

[leons]

dupe, system problem

 

[leons]

Have you checked to see if your normal work causes the issue? Mine doesn't and a lot of others aren't seeing any problems either. Some people are overreacting too. They see 50GB a day and think that this will limit the lifespan of the Mac. It won't. At 50GB/day you can go 30 years even if the TBW spec is only 600 TB.

There are some people who are seeing on the order of 500GB/day and that is definitely a problem in my opinion. Now you are talking 3 years at 600 TBW which is too little in my book. Apple could reassure us by telling us that the TBW is 1000TBW or 1500TBW but so far they haven't said anything except one anonymous spokesperson who claimed it was the tools not working correctly but they disappeared and there has been noth

Apple hasn't said anything, but based on multiple screenshots of base-level Airs, SMART reports 1% used at 16TBW. This implicitly indicates they have rated the drive at 1600TBW. So, at 500GB/day, that's 3200 days=almost 9 years before you have to gift it to the grandkids!

 

[leons]

cancel, MacRumors system problem

 

[telo123]

Safari 14.1 on 11.3 Beta 5 seems to be more reluctant in using virtual memory, leading to less disk writes, in comparison to Safari 14.0.3 on 11.2.3.

11.3 Beta 5 is nice.

 

[Thistle41]

Yes so it does indeed seem like your mac is being kept awake by some processes. Do check if they continue to stick around after reboot too.

My advice to you is, if your overall writes (including your normal use of the system) divided by your overall uptime (found by typing 'uptime' in terminal) is less than 5GB / hour, then i'd say it's a non issue. Averaging 5GB/hr or less on a modern SSD like this will give you years of use into the territory where something else is more likely to fail rather than the SSD regardless.

That all being said, I'm attaching what things look like on my side. Interestingly, my sleep was supposedly being stopped by Handoff, so I disabled and re-enabled it and now it no longer says that it's preventing sleep. I've potentially stumbled upon a bug here and I'm going to check if Handoff starts preventing sleep again later.

So, yesterday I did a reboot and also turned off 'Handoff' (but not back on like you did) and also turned off 'Sharing' as that shows up in the assertions.

Better results. Previously I had overnight 11Gb over 13Hrs, this morning it is 5.7Gb over 11.5Hrs. I will use it as normal to see what the day-to-day usage looks like. Good tips as well thanks but it is a chore that I didn't expect on a Mac.

 

[Ektachrome]

Don't wait. The positive impact this wonderful machine will have on your computing life is orders-of-magnitude greater than the minor adjustments you might temporarily need to make until Apple adjusts MacOS. The temporary solutions (if you even need them) are all here in this thread. The only thing you should be "testing" at the Apple store is which color you like!

Sorry to ask, but is there an up-to-date post with the latest working methods to mitigate this, please? (I’ve just come across it and don’t have several days to read the whole thread 😉)

Like the other poster, this is all which is putting me off purchasing at this point.

I am a Lightroom Classic user if this makes a difference, and it would be a major use case for this machine...

 

[Ektachrome]

FWIW I've been checking my SMART stats daily, getting screenshots of Terminal so I can reference later, and I'm seeing less than 1 TBW for almost a week... I received my M1 MBP 16GB/2TB Nov 27, 2020 and didn't check my stats until Feb 23, 2021 where I was at 22.7 TBW. Soooo, the initial shock is gone. I'm using all of the same apps other people are troubleshooting, Edge, Safari, Parallels (4 VMs), streaming lots of videos on YouTube and even using the HBOmax app to watch the Snyder Cut. I'm pretty sure if caches building up and writing a lot to disk from streaming were a universal problem, I'd be seeing an issue as well. And I'm no longer noticing a large amount of TBW after macOS 11.2.2 or 11.2.3, one of those. And now on macOS 11.3 b4 & b5.

Interesting this might not be a universal issue. I wonder if there’s some difference in you’re setup somehow?

Also, is there any correlation to what resolution of screen/monitor people are using?

Do you use Lightroom or Photoshop or any more heavy processing apps?