I've tried Edge with a tab discard extension and it definitely is much more efficient than Chrome, but even with Edge, my Mac writes about 500 GB - 1 TB a day after 2-3 days of uptime vs 3-4 TB on Chrome, which is still quite a lot. Rebooting Mac once a day does seem to help though. Right now I'm at 227 TBW and 14% of lifetime used in three months.
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ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written
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How many Tabs open on average? Which tab discarder? Still using Spark mail?
About 30-50 on average, I use The Great Suspender Original. Regarding email client, I switched to Mimestream, but I don't think Spark was the actual culprit, it was just a reboot that reduced my writes that time.
Try switching to '"Auto Tab Discard" with the attached settings.
Attachments
After switching (and removing The Great Suspender), reboot and note your Swap Used from Activity Monitor. In 24 hours, re-check Swap Used and check Data Written.
Considering that a (diminishing and low) number of people here, like you, still do have an unbelievably high number of writes and also considering that by this time millions of M1 Macs have been sold... Is there any possibility that a few of us have just plain defective hardware? Maybe a faulty SSD controller chip, or something?
I am not sure the evidence points in this direction but it is very strange that for some people the writes are that high and it seems that nothing can be done software-wise to prevent them... while others, like leons, can make a few changes and go back to normal and others (like me) never experience (at least so far) anything remotely comparable right from the start...
Big Sur is the same for all of us.
I assume that you featherlessbird have made the recommended changes and yet... no cigar. And I also assume that, well, that you are not really writing near 1TB a day due to your workflow...
I guess more than 90% of people are not tech illiterate enough to even think about that. They buy it, boot it up and do whatever they do and don't care because they don't know about it.
Those people are actually Apples's main target audience. Apple doesn't like people who like to tinker or look under the hood.
I switched to Brave (primarily for Security/Privacy) some time back, so had to re-check my notes. For Edge, in addition to Auto Tab Discrd, you should manually go to the Caches folder in the system folder and set the Microsoft Edge folder to read-only. (located in Users/"username"/Library/Caches)
Further to all the great advice leons has gave so far, there are additional tweaks including limiting time machine snapshots, limiting unnecessary spotlight indexing, and adjusting pmset (power management) settings in the terminal, that some users have reported success with (including me).
I say you follow leons advice and check how it’s going for you after taking the steps he suggested and getting results in 24 hours with your typical workflow. If the writes are low and manageable, great! But if the writes are still high you can further try to lower them with these tweaks and i’ll explain what to do if need be (these have been documented in this thread in the past)
This thread or anyone who knows about the SSD write issue, make up a very, very small population of those who have an M1 device.
Very true. Anyone who notices the issue will be here finding out how to fix it.
The majority of users who will likely not notice it will not be looking for a fix. Time really will tell and maybe Apple might have to start a replacement recall down the line if enough m1 macs start failing. Who knows what will happen...
But as an m1 user who has fixed my crazy writes i’m only curious to see how it all pans out, and in no way do i ever need this recall to happen as my SSD is writing at very healthy rates so it will not be failing. But for the good of the majority, I hope Apple acknowledges and deals with the situation properly.
So it's somehow recirculating data. Reading and writing the same data over and over again for no reason.
This is what most people are experiencing.
The issue I'm seeing is that you probably didn't load up to 4TB of web pages in one day. That would be near impossible to do. Even just straight downloading 4TB's is unlikely. So either the program or the OS (I'm blaming the OS as it doesn't happen in Windows or Linux), is doing this.
But why anyone would program this in, is beyond me.
I'm thinking it's because of how slow OS X starts up items, so Apple believes it needs to constantly cache everything to make it seem like it's fast.
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Hi again,
-Tab suspender,
-Using universal apps
-No browser cache
Any other improvements about this problem? I didnt ready maybe last 20 pages, because i have about 10 - 15 GB write per day with listed solutions.
And i'm using firefox for a while. Are there any other browsers without cache and with good tab suspender? Brave? Opera?
-Tab suspender,
-Using universal apps
-No browser cache
Any other improvements about this problem? I didnt ready maybe last 20 pages, because i have about 10 - 15 GB write per day with listed solutions.
And i'm using firefox for a while. Are there any other browsers without cache and with good tab suspender? Brave? Opera?
Correct me if you made a typo, but if you’re writing 10-15GB a day that works out to <0.7GB per hour, which is 5.5TB a year.
This would put you at an SSD lifetime of more than 112 years
So if you did not make a typo, you have nothing to worry about.
Hi. First time poster here.
Although I’m a light user of Mac, I had been suffering from excessive SSD writes since I bought M1 MBP 256GB 16GB RAM.
I’m not as knowledgeable about tech as you guys but I tried my best and the problem has gone now.
(I mainly use Mac for web browsing, Microsoft Office, Logic Pro and photo editing.)
Here is what I did.
1. Changed browser from Safari to Firefox and changed some settings.
[about:config]
browser.cache.disk.enable → false
browser.cache.memory.enable → true (default)
browser.tabs.remote.autostart. → false
*I also tried “browser.cache.memory.capacity”, and “browser.cache.check_doc_frequency”, but it didn’t help anything.
2. Delete some sideloaded iOS apps
I sideloaded some apps from iPad by using iMazing. Some of them works fine but some of them induced excessive kernel_task writes, so I deleted problematic ones*.
* SMBC (Japanese bank app), Google Maps, Slide for Reddit, EOW(JP - Eng dictionary app)
3. Uncheck “Use recommended performance settings” and "Use hardware acceleration when available” in the Firefox’s Preferences.
When I browse Google Maps (I like to browse Street View), sudden excessive kernel_task writes happens after 30 minutes or so.
Since unchecking the two, the problem hasn’t happened so far.
*Google Maps gets a bit laggy by doing this.
*When I browse photos on Flickr, I experienced the same problem as Google Maps (sudden kernel_task writes increase). It seems the problem has been fixed too after changing the settings.
4. I use tab suspender add-ons only when it’s needed.
I usually open about 10 tabs at the same time. In my case, I don’t necessarily need to use tab suspender add-ons all the time.
* Firefox (10 tabs), Excel, Outlook, Terminal, Activity Monitor, Mail, Notes and stickies remain open and the memory usage is always at around 10GB.
Note: Obviously, English is not my native language. Please overlook the poor wording. Thanks.
Although I’m a light user of Mac, I had been suffering from excessive SSD writes since I bought M1 MBP 256GB 16GB RAM.
I’m not as knowledgeable about tech as you guys but I tried my best and the problem has gone now.
(I mainly use Mac for web browsing, Microsoft Office, Logic Pro and photo editing.)
Here is what I did.
1. Changed browser from Safari to Firefox and changed some settings.
[about:config]
browser.cache.disk.enable → false
browser.cache.memory.enable → true (default)
browser.tabs.remote.autostart. → false
*I also tried “browser.cache.memory.capacity”, and “browser.cache.check_doc_frequency”, but it didn’t help anything.
2. Delete some sideloaded iOS apps
I sideloaded some apps from iPad by using iMazing. Some of them works fine but some of them induced excessive kernel_task writes, so I deleted problematic ones*.
* SMBC (Japanese bank app), Google Maps, Slide for Reddit, EOW(JP - Eng dictionary app)
3. Uncheck “Use recommended performance settings” and "Use hardware acceleration when available” in the Firefox’s Preferences.
When I browse Google Maps (I like to browse Street View), sudden excessive kernel_task writes happens after 30 minutes or so.
Since unchecking the two, the problem hasn’t happened so far.
*Google Maps gets a bit laggy by doing this.
*When I browse photos on Flickr, I experienced the same problem as Google Maps (sudden kernel_task writes increase). It seems the problem has been fixed too after changing the settings.
4. I use tab suspender add-ons only when it’s needed.
I usually open about 10 tabs at the same time. In my case, I don’t necessarily need to use tab suspender add-ons all the time.
* Firefox (10 tabs), Excel, Outlook, Terminal, Activity Monitor, Mail, Notes and stickies remain open and the memory usage is always at around 10GB.
Note: Obviously, English is not my native language. Please overlook the poor wording. Thanks.
In today's M1 iMac presentation they said "You can have 100s of tabs open (in Safari)."
Obviously, Apple considers lots of tabs to be normal use. So much for the people saying we are using our computers in unintended ways.
Obviously, Apple considers lots of tabs to be normal use. So much for the people saying we are using our computers in unintended ways.
Yes, but ONLY in your tab usage. 😜I KNEW I was normal!
Curious to see how this topic will develop with M1 hitting the iPad. Keep up the good suggestions for this issues guys, let's make noise...
So I finally received my 16/512 MBA M1. First thing I did was download drivedx, and it says that my cycle count was 74 times or so. However when I go to system report, it says my cycle count was only 1.
In addition, the oh-so-scary "data written" reported by drivedx was about 90GB, and this was literally within 2 or 3 hours of turning on my mac for the very first time. When I checked activity monitor, i went to the "Disk" tab and in the bottom right, it says "data written" was about 8 GB.
This thread has 90 pages worth of posts, did anyone ever come to a conclusion on whether or not drivedx is reporting accurate numbers?
In addition, the oh-so-scary "data written" reported by drivedx was about 90GB, and this was literally within 2 or 3 hours of turning on my mac for the very first time. When I checked activity monitor, i went to the "Disk" tab and in the bottom right, it says "data written" was about 8 GB.
This thread has 90 pages worth of posts, did anyone ever come to a conclusion on whether or not drivedx is reporting accurate numbers?
Yes it is.
But these 90GB are meaningless since they enclose the factory testing, initial macOS load and patches and so. Just work normally for a week and then check drivedx again to see the difference and reach a more adequate conclusion.
Hmmm i remember seeing someone say that these drivedx numbers are not accurate.
Anyway, will do, thanks.