What does the percentage show? That would give you a better idea at to the true 100% TBW of the drive rather than a total TBW picked from who knows where.
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ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written
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It's beyond my paygrade to "sticky", but here it is in detail:
type in the address bar about:config
then press the button i'll be careful i promise
then type in the bar browser.cache.disk.enable
then double click on it, to make it false
exit firefox and restart-it.
do the same with browser.cache.memory.enable
His percentage used shows zero (I promise)!
(as it will continue to say for the next year unless his usage pattern drastically changes)
OK, so massive improvements in the SSD swap write activity. Running uptime shows 2 days 7Hrs with 42Gb written. Same kind of activity as before, general web browsing, website management, Word etc.
I've been using Edge with the tab discard, switched off sharing, and all of Spotlight except Applications. Followed the suggestions from @TheSynchronizer (hat tip) regarding some deeper keep awake threads as I was finding a lot of activity was happening overnight during the MBA sleep. Use 'sudo pmset -g assertions' (from an admin account) to see what's keeping it awake. See my posts passim as to the details.
I may go back to Firefox as Edge is a bit odd but other than that I think with the help on this forum the problem is cracked!
I've been using Edge with the tab discard, switched off sharing, and all of Spotlight except Applications. Followed the suggestions from @TheSynchronizer (hat tip) regarding some deeper keep awake threads as I was finding a lot of activity was happening overnight during the MBA sleep. Use 'sudo pmset -g assertions' (from an admin account) to see what's keeping it awake. See my posts passim as to the details.
I may go back to Firefox as Edge is a bit odd but other than that I think with the help on this forum the problem is cracked!
Tried firefox + auto tab discard and they works like charm !
No more disk writes and memory usage.
Now i'm moving my cloud files from onedrive to icloud. So onedrive is intel app and needs rosetta.
Any other things to make better?
Also a step by step pinned thread would be good for everyone with these issues.
No more disk writes and memory usage.
Now i'm moving my cloud files from onedrive to icloud. So onedrive is intel app and needs rosetta.
Any other things to make better?
Also a step by step pinned thread would be good for everyone with these issues.
Keep an eye on disk usage for a day or two and let us know. You probably don't need to do anything else.
I’ve switched to Firefox from Edge myself even after being a big fan of edge
So far its a great experience!Best part is tab discard works just as well on Firefox, as well as all the other tweaks. You can even export the tab discard settings from the extension options inside Edge and import them on the firefox extension.
Im not sure how I could go about getting an admin to sticky a post, but if anyone knows I’d be happy to write up a summary of all tweaks to try with credits to all the others here that helped too
I’m glad we were able to help! Enjoy your mac
I’ve switched to Firefox from Edge myself even after being a big fan of edge
Best part is tab discard works just as well on Firefox, as well as all the other tweaks. You can even export the tab discard settings from the extension options inside Edge and import them on the firefox extension.
Im not sure how I could go about getting an admin to sticky a post, but if anyone knows I’d be happy to write up a summary of all tweaks to try with credits to all the others here that helped too
I’m glad we were able to help! Enjoy your mac
You can start a new thread with all of those tweaks. Maybe admins will stick it.
Thank you for all.
Is everyone who is having trouble with Safari writing to disk too much using an 8 GB M1? I have a 16 GB M1 MBA and I'm not seeing any issue with Safari. I have a current uptime of ~9 days with a total Data written at ~300 GB. That's with using Safari nearly exclusively (I do use Firefox to watch Disney+ because that site is broken on Safari.) I don't usually have that many tabs though. Routinely about 5-10 tabs at a time. I doubt I've ever had as many as 20 tabs unless I was testing Safari or something.
I've had the M1 MBA since the release day November 17, 2020 and I only have about 8 TBW according to smartmontools. So no SSD issue here.
I've had the M1 MBA since the release day November 17, 2020 and I only have about 8 TBW according to smartmontools. So no SSD issue here.
Not sure. I AM 8GB, but a tab abuser. So, we need to hear from 16GB people who regularly run 20+ tabs in Safari.
Did you notice that Edge has a “Sleeping tabs” feature? Did you compare that in terms of the memory usage vs. Auto tab discard? I’ve enabled both but not sure if I should just use one or another.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
Yes. Sleeping tabs is a lot less aggressive and a passive process - the tab isn't actually discarded so it doesn't need to be reloaded when you click on it. But the memory savings are a lot smaller compared to complete discarding of the tabs. Maybe if you don't use a large amount of tabs then the built in sleeping tabs will be sufficient enough to reduce your memory useage slightly, which can still help prevent unnecessary swapping.
In my case I always used a large (50+) amount of tabs pretty much daily on Edge, with many other apps running all the time, so I went the Auto tab discard route. I also found that having them both enabled sometimes seemed to interfere with the function of ATD, so be careful of that.
Everyone's use case is different and so naturally everyone's needs will be different. Some people may not require full tab discarding on their browser to maintain healthy rates of SSD writing, due to only running limited number of tabs / apps.
Personally I'm very happy with full tab discarding with ATD because I never have to worry about how many apps I'm running and I can focus on my work instead. I rarely check my writes in activity monitor now, but when I do, they're always in the range of 0.7-2GB per hour, which puts me at many many years of SSD life.
So true! I’m in my 70’s so won’t take that bet 😁
Ok I am about to buy my MBA M1. Could someone please tell me and summarize all the things I need to check? For example, I need to download DriveDx so I can see all the data written, percentage used, etc.
Apart from DriveDx, what else do I need to keep an eye on? Does drivedx have the TBW data and if so, what is a good number to aim? Is 1TBW/month a good number to aim for?
Apart from DriveDx, what else do I need to keep an eye on? Does drivedx have the TBW data and if so, what is a good number to aim? Is 1TBW/month a good number to aim for?
If you are at all comfortable with the terminal command line you don't need to pay anything since smartmontools is open source and free. You can install it with Homebrew (https://homebrew.sh).
Install
/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"Then
brew install smartmontoolsI'm at almost 8 TBW now and still at 0% used (I don't think that the % used has been verified to be correct yet but it is the best we have right now). So assuming it goes to 1% at 8 TBW (no evidence of this but just using it as a guess) then 100% would be 800 TBW. This is on a 1 TB SSD. So 1 TBW/month would be 800 months or 66 years. I think you probably don't have to be that conservative. Note that smaller SSDs tend to have shorter TBW values but even 400 TBW would be 33 years. The people who are having problems are seeing 1 TBW in a matter of days not months.
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I've got good news for both of you (and all)........1% is 16TBW.......NOW recompute!
You are going to LOVE your new MBA! P.S. I WAS getting 1 - 1.5TBW a DAY, now below normal!
Was this fixed by a software update or did you have to alter your use of the machine and disable a bunch of OS features? Because doing that stuff is a total non-starter for me, on principle alone.
If you must use Safari and you must have 20+ tabs open on a regular basis and you are not willing to change browsers until a fix, then we won't start you! ;-)
I've also disabled by OneDrive client sync app. The main reason is because it simply doesn't appear to handle syncing large sets of files (I have over 400,000), even with "offline files" enabled. It tries to process my 400,000+ files at the rate of about 1 per 5 seconds (> 23 days). It also seems to do a lot of disk writing (500GB per day?) that I can do without....
I have no idea what OneDrive is trying to process, when it should not be downloading or uploading any files with "offline files" enabled. I suppose it's just scanning every file to crate meta-data for its sync process, but this might involve actually downloading the file temporarily to scan it? Who knows, but it's a incredibly frustrating piece of software on both Mac and Windows, but especially on Mac.
I have 1TB storage with my MS business account, but I'm going to use it for long term archive only rather than real-time syncing. Dropbox and Google Backup & Sync are *way* faster for the actual sync. OneDrive is quite fast if you up/download directly to the browser or use a 3rd party file transfer tool like Cyberduck.
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SSD size?I've got good news for both of you (and all)........1% is 16TBW.......NOW recompute!
If it is double 800 TBW then not much to recompute. I just passed 8 TBW and it is still at 0%. Like I said in my post, of all the values coming from smartmontools, that is one I trust the least. There haven't been enough people confirming the values yet.I've got good news for both of you (and all)........1% is 16TBW.......NOW recompute!