ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

[Thistle41]

I found this article which argues that as we have lived with SSDs soldered in on our phones for years that means we are unlikely to run into problems. His usage over 4 months gave a smarttools 2% life used. Quick calc gives 16 years expected life before the 100% is reached which we know just means out of warranty.

My only gripe with this analysis is that phone OS does not - probably - work in the same way as a desktop/laptop.

I'm with the MBA 8/256 spec so uses a different drive to the referenced article but I would expect similar or perhaps slightly less TBW spec (as we assume the Air is entry-level and the Pro is well, 'pro'.

I also turned off the FF performance options as suggested above by N&A #2241. Seems to help without any obvious downside.

 

[leons]

The concern isn't necessarily how long the drive will last. It's the mass amount of resources being consumed for no reason. This effects performance and battery life.

I'm not suggesting that this should not be fixed, as there are those who don't even realize what's happening and those who are unwilling/unable to make adjustments due to their desires or workflow. However, just as a data point of observation, when I was having the problem, I noticed no degradation in performance or battery.

 

[ManicMarc]

I found this article which argues that as we have lived with SSDs soldered in on our phones for years that means we are unlikely to run into problems. His usage over 4 months gave a smarttools 2% life used. Quick calc gives 16 years expected life before the 100% is reached which we know just means out of warranty.

My only gripe with this analysis is that phone OS does not - probably - work in the same way as a desktop/laptop.

I'm with the MBA 8/256 spec so uses a different drive to the referenced article but I would expect similar or perhaps slightly less TBW spec (as we assume the Air is entry-level and the Pro is well, 'pro'.

I also turned off the FF performance options as suggested above by N&A #2241. Seems to help without any obvious downside.

It's a good point. How many people have hundreds of huge apps installed on their phone that are rarely used but are updated every other week? All that data being written to the internal flash memory for no reason.

 

[leons]

It's a good point. How many people have hundreds of huge apps installed on their phone that are rarely used but are updated every other week? All that data being written to the internal flash memory for no reason.

Interesting point. I have NEVER heard of even 1 instance of a phone's flash memory dying.

 

[Ektachrome]

To me, this almost seems to indicate one of three things... either
1) Apple is counting on very few future iMac owners checking their activity monitor for SSD writes and instead just using the machine with 100+ safari tabs writing away boatloads of swap to their SSD -> faster death, faster mac repurchase?
2) Apple is using some crazy advanced SSD technology that can withstand such high writes for a 'normal' period of ownership of, say, 8 years.
3) Or Big Sur 11.3 will be fixing a lot of swap management issues and an upcoming Safari update will be implementing memory management / tab discarding / tab sleeping / fixing the excessive Safari Cached Web Content caching.

Sincerely hoping for 3 (and 2).. but it could very well be point 1.

Completely agree. And I have the same hopes and misgivings also.

 

[AdamNC]

Interesting video..... I tried it and in the last 2 weeks I have only written 11gigs to my drive.

 

[leons]

Interesting video..... I tried it and in the last 2 weeks I have only written 11gigs to my drive.

That will help if you are a video-abuser, but will not help a tab-abuser.

 

[AdamNC]

That will help if you are a video-abuser, but will not help a tab-abuser.

True but hey every bit helps.

 

[leons]

Yes, I'm just very tab-centric, I have 56 open right now! 😳

 

[osplo]

Looks like we'll be able to continue our AppleCare+ Support beyond the standard 2 years. I'd assume if I did this for my M1 MBP, and say maybe 3½ years from now my Drive fails, regardless of reasoning, they'd either fix or replace it.

AppleCare+ Coverage for Mac Can Now Be Extended Beyond Three Years

In addition to making AppleCare+ available for the Apple TV for the first time, Apple is now allowing AppleCare+ coverage for Macs to be extended...

www.macrumors.com

The possibility of extending Apple Care for longer than 3 years (apparently for ever) will reduce a lot of anxiety for some people.

 

[telo123]

The possibility of extending Apple Care for longer than 3 years (apparently for ever) will reduce a lot of anxiety for some people.

Only if you live in the United States, unfortunately.

 

[gank41]

Only if you live in the United States, unfortunately.

Says it’s available in Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, the UK, and in the US.

::::Sorry, I misread that::::

Extend your AppleCare+ coverage - Apple Support

If your AppleCare+ plan expired recently, you might be able to continue coverage.

support.apple.com

 

[mr_jomo]

Shouldn't matter. Why write 6-8GB's of data with just a few doc's open idle.
On Windows I have autosave and onedrive backup with multiple huge Excel files, Outlook, and Word open all day. It isn't even close to 500MB's written in an entire day.

Good point, but still - I'll investigate today. At least I'll have more information for a bug report to Microsoft 🥳

 

[Ningj]

Shouldn't matter. Why write 6-8GB's of data with just a few doc's open idle.
On Windows I have autosave and onedrive backup with multiple huge Excel files, Outlook, and Word open all day. It isn't even close to 500MB's written in an entire day.

Wasnt arguing was just tring to recreate your setup as Im not seeing it on my system - 11.3 RC1 Office 16.48, autosave off, not using onedrive. Will try again with larger documents.

 

[wirtandi]

Ok

So far everything is ok, my data written in activity monitor is low, my kernel_task is low, drivedx's data written is low.

I tried watching a stream on youtube and my firefox in activity monitor goes up quite quickly. The first thing that came to my mind was disabling browser caching as suggested by some here. I will try to do it, but what are the downsides of disabling caching?

 

[Moldancopter]

Im quite concerned about this tendency and the issue with the life expectancy of the SSD, especially since I tend to keep my MBAs for a good 5y + and if I cant swap the SSD out for a new one if it fails, its an issue.

is the current issue fixable in a sw update or is it how the Big Sur architecture is ? thanks

 

[Mike Boreham]

Withdrawn

 

[TheSynchronizer]

The concern isn't necessarily how long the drive will last. It's the mass amount of resources being consumed for no reason. This effects performance and battery life.

Battery life? Sure, to some degree it will affect battery life as naturally energy is required to perform SSD writes.

But swap is actually only positive for the performance and responsiveness of a system. Sure, for many people here who are yet to fix their writes, or their situation/workflow means that they can't necessarily fix them (yet), the swapping is excessive and larger than traditional x86 systems.

But Safari caching every single closed tab and not freeing memory, in the rare chance that you happen to re-open the tab after closing it, is proof that Apple's approach is highest performance at all costs, even if that means crazy amounts of SSD writing.

With that all being said, if you were to plot amount of data being swapped and performance gain on a graph, there would be a point on the graph where it just plateaus and further swapping = no performance gain = excessive swapping.

 

[TheSynchronizer]

Ok

So far everything is ok, my data written in activity monitor is low, my kernel_task is low, drivedx's data written is low.

I tried watching a stream on youtube and my firefox in activity monitor goes up quite quickly. The first thing that came to my mind was disabling browser caching as suggested by some here. I will try to do it, but what are the downsides of disabling caching?

If you have an internet connection good enough to watch youtube in 1080p, then likely no noticeable downsides of disabling any browser caching. Websites will load maybe a couple milliseconds longer than if you had caching enabled.

Go into about:config on firefox, set browser.cache.disk.enable to false, and you can set browser.cache.memory.enable to either true or false depending on what you want, true meaning that firefox will theoretically use more memory when running.

 

[deeddawg]

Anyone else notice this thread is not active as it used to be? Perhaps people are, like me, getting sick and tired of all these speculations and calculations and work arounds, while Apple has said literally nothing at all about this.

If so, totally understandable. I still follow this thread, but without the worry and anxiety I once had 😆 in the event I do get an affected unit, then so be it, I will face it and come up with a solution.

That goes back to something I posted early in this thread:

Just use the computer as you expect to use the computer.

Evaluate the situation as you near the end of your warranty coverage, whether that is one year or three.

If at that time there is evidence to suggest the system might not remain functional to the remainder of your anticipated time of ownership, then sell it and buy a replacement - using whatever new knowledge about the matter the community has at that time.

Meanwhile continue to keep up with a proper backup methodology, and know what your business continuity / disaster recovery plans are in the event the system fails. Which every should be doing anyway regardless of any potential SSD stuff.

... and with Applecare now available to continue beyond three years, seems like there's even less reason for deep concern right now. We'll see what happens in time; whether it turns into a true issue for folks and whether/what Apple's response turns out to be.

 

[ambient_light]

As a heads-up, 11.4b1 seems to be using swap less aggressively than 11.3. Gonna monitor it further, but the first day of my usual workload is rather promising.

 

[leons]

Im quite concerned about this tendency and the issue with the life expectancy of the SSD, especially since I tend to keep my MBAs for a good 5y + and if I cant swap the SSD out for a new one if it fails, its an issue.

is the current issue fixable in a sw update or is it how the Big Sur architecture is ? thanks

1. Most never see the issue 2. If you do, it is most likely able to be mitigated by the methods in this thread 3) It will likely be fixed in a future release 4) If you are really worried (most of us well informed on the issue are not), you can carry AppleCare for as long as you like.

 

[leons]

As a heads-up, 11.4b1 seems to be using swap less aggressively than 11.3. Gonna monitor it further, but the first day of my usual workload is rather promising.

Great! Plz let us know when you have comparative numbers.

 

[nothingtoseehere]

All our M1-SSDs will DIE within 2 years and we can do absolutely nothing about it but throwing away our devices.

 

[chouseworth]

All our M1-SSDs will DIE within 2 years and we can do absolutely nothing about it but throwing away our devices.

Before you just throw them away, please consider putting them on eBay or Craigslist. There are plenty of people on this thread who will pay you very green dollars for them.