ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

[kubilaydem]

Which settings should i change on firefox to disable cache?

browser.cache.disk.enable = true
browser.cache.memory.enable = true

 

[leons]

Duplicate

 

[imdropbear]

browser.cache.disk.enable is caching on your SSD.
browser.cache.memory.enable is caching in your RAM.

 

[leons]

Which browser is best for ssd health?

Safari, chrome, firefox, edge?

Some of the people who have responded have not read the previous posts. Please search this thread for help on this topic, in particular to posts by TheSynchronizer. In general, at this time, Safari is the worst offender for this issue, followed closely by Chrome, neither of which seems to pay attention to settings to stop caching. Edge and Firefox work well in this regard. Many of the answers given in recent posts are incomplete as to adjustments needed to be made to stop caching. The specific instructions on how to do this are in those previous posts.

 

[Ektachrome]

In the unlikely event that these SSDs have some disease that has never been seen before, and it is a problem that can't be fixed with a software patch(s)

As far as I've come to understand it, it's not a disease of the SSD, it's a problem with the OS and/or Apps writing excessively to the SSD. It seems no one knows yet (possibly apart from Apple) whether this is software related, or just the way SOC architecture works and, e.g., it may be proprietary, so we might never know until patents expire, so Apple may have good reason to never disclose this.

it will be known far before the warranty is over. It would be expensive for them, but Apple would make it good.

Does anyone even know what's causing it yet, let alone whether it will ever be admitted as a warranty issue? For example, if it is a part of how SOC works, it wouldn't necessarily be considered a fault. Has Apple reassured us this would be covered under warranty if it were ever an issue? What is the warranty period on the internal SSD on these? It would be reassuring if it were confirmed that e.g. the warranty on them was a certain amount of Terabytes or years.

However, it is far more than likely that Apple utilized SSDs that are least marginally better than the industry average.

Do we have evidence of this? That would certainly be useful/reassuring to know.

SSD's in general are very mature in the tech product lifecycle, and are now a commodity item with few issues. But, even if these SSD's are only going to live until their normal predicted life, they will survive well past many other components in the system.

I thought the concern the thread was discussing was that, if the original issues remained unresolved, the internal SSDs wouldn't survive long at all, if industry norms for TBW life cycles were to be assumed in the absence of hard data on this from Apple?

 

[Aggedor]

So have we worked out if this is a problem yet? I last checked in several weeks ago and it looks like there are 72 pages here without much of a conclusion yet.

Edit: So we should switch away from Safari, if we use it? Is it as simple as that?

 

[Ektachrome]

Good info, thanks!

 

[Ektachrome]

So have we worked out if this is a problem yet? I last checked in several weeks ago and it looks like there are 72 pages here without much of a conclusion yet.

Basically, it seems it is. In order for it not to be, you essentially have to use workarounds, or not use commonly used software, including Safari, etc., in the normal way it would be used.

 

[leons]

Which browser is best for ssd health?

Safari, chrome, firefox, edge?

How to disable cache?

Search this thread for previous posts by TheSynchronizer

 

[leons]

Without cache then wouldn't a webpage's assets need to be loaded to RAM every refresh, which in turn can cause extra swapping if many pages are opened concurrently?

No. If you disable caching properly (search this thread for previous posts by TheSynchronizer), they will never write to SSD.

 

[leons]

I've had my base M1 air since early December. It is in use for several hours each day, mainly web browsing, a bit of Open Office, plus the usual YouTube and a bit of light photo editing. My usage shows a little under 2.8 TB written.
One YouTube channel which has a well reasoned and calm discussion of the M1 SSD is " Constant Geekery " It's so much better than the bulk of click bait, shouty, !!!!! videos that are out there. Well worth a visit even if you don't necessarily agree with the findings.

Your SSD is well within usage spec and will likely outlast YOU! ;-)

 

[leons]

My Air M1 16/256 is one month old today with 1.05TB of data unit written: I'm using Edge, MS Office, a bunch of chat apps, Miro and Notion for writing, every day as my main driver.
So according to the 150TB threshold, this should last me 150 months.
So I'm assuming that as a "normal" user shouldn't be worried much about this?

At that rate, barring unusual component failure, your SSD will literally outlast you.

 

[kubilaydem]

No. If you disable caching properly (search this thread for previous posts by TheSynchronizer), they will never write to SSD.

Sorry but i cant find any message about disabling firefox cache. There is too much messsages about edge but i dont wanna use edge.

 

[leons]

So have we worked out if this is a problem yet? I last checked in several weeks ago and it looks like there are 72 pages here without much of a conclusion yet.

Edit: So we should switch away from Safari, if we use it? Is it as simple as that?

While there are many more tweaks that help in this thread, yes, for most usage cases changing your browser to Firefox or Edge and disabling caching will take care of the issue.

 

[leons]

Sorry but i cant find any message about disabling firefox cache. There is too much messsages about edge but i dont wanna use edge.

Firefox is one of the few that follows its cache settings. Setting both of the flags you indicated above to "false" is effective. I am running Firefox exclusively, and it has eliminated any further SSD issues.

 

[pshufd]

This is a strange solution. You want browser caching to reduce network traffic and increase overall performance. Are websites so large that they require large objects all the time?

 

[leons]

As far as I've come to understand it, it's not a disease of the SSD, it's a problem with the OS and/or Apps writing excessively to the SSD. It seems no one knows yet (possibly apart from Apple) whether this is software related, or just the way SOC architecture works and, e.g., it may be proprietary, so we might never know until patents expire, so Apple may have good reason to never disclose this.

That's why I said: "in the unlikely event that these SSDs have some disease". I don't believe that they do.

Does anyone even know what's causing it yet, let alone whether it will ever be admitted as a warranty issue? For example, if it is a part of how SOC works, it wouldn't necessarily be considered a fault. Has Apple reassured us this would be covered under warranty if it were ever an issue? What is the warranty period on the internal SSD on these? It would be reassuring if it were confirmed that e.g. the warranty on them was a certain amount of Terabytes or years.

No company puts a separate warranty on discrete computer components above/beyond the overall system. However, given history, I feel confident that IF a significant percentage of purchasers were experiencing SSD failures at a time well below the accepted industry averages, that Apple would make it good regardless of the cause.

Do we have evidence of this [that Apple utilized SSDs that are least marginally better than the industry average]? That would certainly be useful/reassuring to know.

No, but historically components in Apple computers are very often better, or at least on a par with industry-standard quality.

I thought the concern the thread was discussing was that, if the original issues remained unresolved, the internal SSDs wouldn't survive long at all, if industry norms for TBW life cycles were to be assumed in the absence of hard data on this from Apple?

Only if you do nothing to mitigate it. If someone is unwilling to (likely temporarily) make some of the adjustments as stated in this thread (which in the vast majority of cases only consists of changing browser selection) AND they don't feel confident that there will be a fix for this upcoming from Apple, they should wait.

 

[leons]

This is a strange solution. You want browser caching to reduce network traffic and increase overall performance. Are websites so large that they require large objects all the time?

Yes.
If you have anything even approaching a broadband connection, you will never know the differnce.

 

[TheSynchronizer]

Firefox is one of the few that follows its cache settings. Setting both of the flags you indicated above to "false" is effective. I am running Firefox exclusively, and it has eliminated any further SSD issues.

I second what leons is saying all over the board. I’ve given firefox a try and disabled the caches in about:cache, and it works just as well as Edge, maybe even better.

I’ve transferred all my Edge extensions and settings over to firefox, and so far I’m loving it. The memory consumption and SSD writes both seem EVEN lower than Edge, which I already had very low.

And there is a lot of disagreement, as some people don’t have/claim to not have any issues, but I truly believe Safari is one of the biggest culprits in the SSD ‘issue’ when it’s being used with more than a few tabs. As of today, and as of a long time now, from my observations it is simply too greedy with memory. This causes a lot of swapping to be done by other apps as it is caching every website over and over again for the 0.2s faster loading speed in the rare chance that you happen to load that page back after closing it??

And you don’t even have to take my word for it - go on safari and simply load a few of your common tabs, then have activity monitor on the memory tab with ‘Safari’ close the tabs and watch how the memory usage barely decreases.

Both me and @leons were heavily affected by the SSD ‘issue’. But among all the various tweaks I’ve done (ranging from anything like time machine disables, pmset settings, Onyx running and various other tweaks), I can say with 100% certainty that switching from safari to a browser such as Firefox or Edge, with caching disabled and an extension such as Tab Discarder, will eliminate 99% risk of the SSD failing prematurely.

Ofcourse, if you open 100 apps, especially rosetta 2 apps, you will see your swap sky rocket anyway. But browsing with any amount of tabs shouldn’t be doing this - hence why I’ve switched from Safari until apple truly fixes it.

In my case I frequently run NetBeans, IntelliJ, Spotify, Numbers, Preview, Messages, MS Word, Goodnotes, Apple apps like Calendar/Reminder, all at once with around 50 tabs usually in my browser, on my 8GB M1 MBP and currently I have 147GB written after 7 days an 20 hours of uptime. That amounts to 0.78Gb written per hour when i’m using this system as intensively and comfortably I want to. That also amounts to around 60 years of SSD life.

My conclusion is: the M1 chip itself, and the systems that use it, do not have any abnormal SSD writing issues. It is simply apple software such as Safari, Rosetta 2(which you could argue is M1 only) and Big Sur that is mainly contributing to the writes people experience. But these are all certainly fixable issues (atleast Safari and the swapping behaviour by Big Sur definitely is fixable, it’s possible that rosetta 2 will always be heavier on the memory due to how it works in nature), but nevertheless i’ve seen all my apps gradually get optimised to M1 native versions anyway.

All in all, i adore my M1 MBP. I use it all the time and for everything. It’s the best overall computer i’ve ever owned by far.

 

[kubilaydem]

I second what leons is saying all over the board. I’ve given firefox a try and disabled the caches in about:cache, and it works just as well as Edge, maybe even better.

I’ve transferred all my Edge extensions and settings over to firefox, and so far I’m loving it. The memory consumption and SSD writes both seem EVEN lower than Edge, which I already had very low.

And there is a lot of disagreement, as some people don’t have/claim to not have any issues, but I truly believe Safari is one of the biggest culprits in the SSD ‘issue’ when it’s being used with more than a few tabs. As of today, and as of a long time now, from my observations it is simply too greedy with memory. This causes a lot of swapping to be done by other apps as it is caching every website over and over again for the 0.2s faster loading speed in the rare chance that you happen to load that page back after closing it??

And you don’t even have to take my word for it - go on safari and simply load a few of your common tabs, then have activity monitor on the memory tab with ‘Safari’ close the tabs and watch how the memory usage barely decreases.

Both me and @leons were heavily affected by the SSD ‘issue’. But among all the various tweaks I’ve done (ranging from anything like time machine disables, pmset settings, Onyx running and various other tweaks), I can say with 100% certainty that switching from safari to a browser such as Firefox or Edge, with caching disabled and an extension such as Tab Discarder, will eliminate 99% risk of the SSD failing prematurely.

Ofcourse, if you open 100 apps, especially rosetta 2 apps, you will see your swap sky rocket anyway. But browsing with any amount of tabs shouldn’t be doing this - hence why I’ve switched from Safari until apple truly fixes it.

In my case I frequently run NetBeans, IntelliJ, Spotify, Numbers, Preview, Messages, MS Word, Goodnotes, Apple apps like Calendar/Reminder, all at once with around 50 tabs usually in my browser, on my 8GB M1 MBP and currently I have 147GB written after 7 days an 20 hours of uptime. That amounts to 0.78Gb written per hour when i’m using this system as intensively and comfortably I want to. That also amounts to around 60 years of SSD life.

My conclusion is: the M1 chip itself, and the systems that use it, do not have any abnormal SSD writing issues. It is simply apple software such as Safari, Rosetta 2(which you could argue is M1 only) and Big Sur that is mainly contributing to the writes people experience. But these are all certainly fixable issues (atleast Safari and the swapping behaviour by Big Sur definitely is fixable, it’s possible that rosetta 2 will always be heavier on the memory due to how it works in nature), but nevertheless i’ve seen all my apps gradually get optimised to M1 native versions anyway.

All in all, i adore my M1 MBP. I use it all the time and for everything. It’s the best overall computer i’ve ever owned by far.

Thank you for info.

First i didnt noticed any extra write with safari but now i feel a little extra write (3-4 gb per hour extra).

Now i installed firefox. And disabled this two;

-browser.cache.disk.enable
-browser.cache.memory.enable

Now if i look about:cache section

I see "storage disk location: none, only stored in memory" on both disk and memory.

The setting are right?

Then i search for extensions. Found those; Total Suspender, New Tab Suspender, Tab Suspender etc. Which one works well for this purpose?

Thank you..

 

[leons]

Thank you for info.

First i didnt noticed any extra write with safari but now i feel a little extra write (3-4 gb per hour extra).

Now i installed firefox. And disabled this two;

-browser.cache.disk.enable
-browser.cache.memory.enable

Now if i look about:cache section

I see "storage disk location: none, only stored in memory" on both disk and memory.

The setting are right?

Then i search for extensions. Found those; Total Suspender, New Tab Suspender, Tab Suspender etc. Which one works well for this purpose?

Thank you..

Assuming when you say "disabled" that you mean that you set those two to "false", you got it.
I'm not sure about the others, but I'm using Auto Tab Discard with great success, and unless he changed, it is TheSynchronizer's choice as well.

 

[pshufd]

Yes.
If you have anything even approaching a broadband connection, you will never know the differnce.

We have bandwidth caps. We typically run about 50% of the caps but I worry if everything is getting larger.

 

[leons]

We have bandwidth caps. We typically run about 50% of the caps but I worry if everything is getting larger.

Not likely an issue for bandwidth, even with caps. Do it for a day and measure if you want to be sure, but very unlikely.

 

[TheSynchronizer]

Thank you for info.

First i didnt noticed any extra write with safari but now i feel a little extra write (3-4 gb per hour extra).

Now i installed firefox. And disabled this two;

-browser.cache.disk.enable
-browser.cache.memory.enable

Now if i look about:cache section

I see "storage disk location: none, only stored in memory" on both disk and memory.

The setting are right?

Then i search for extensions. Found those; Total Suspender, New Tab Suspender, Tab Suspender etc. Which one works well for this purpose?

Thank you..

As far as I’m aware (this is my first day using firefox) those are the settings to disable to have caching only in memory, and the settings I’ve applied myself.

And like leons said I am using Auto Tab Discard, it’s worked great on both Edge and now works perfectly well on Firefox too. I’m sure there are viable alternatives but I haven’t had to look for any

 

[Aggedor]

Thanks for the info.

Is it possible to sticky the cache disable settings somewhere? I know they were posted by @TheSynchronizer, as @leons says, but for new people coming into this large thread, they are hard to find (I haven't found them yet!). I want to shift from Safari to Firefox, but I also want to make sure I get the settings right!