Best way to preserve it would be to take it a step further and not even take it out of the box. Just leave it in a cupboard in its original packaging. Building a little shrine with nice RGB lighting to keep the unopened box on display is optional, but highly recommended.
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Want to preserve the lifespan/value of your M1 Mac?
- Thread starter Luposian
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LOL what a load of nonsense. I'm far from being a fan of non removable SSD's, however wear and tear isn't an aspect I'd be remotely concerned about with modern SSD's. I've still got old 15" MBP's from 2012 with SSD's that were used heavily in a professional role, then passed around the family, the SSD's are perfectly fine.
Security concerns are covered by File Vault outside of very few who are constrained by contractual obligations and if you don't back up your data more the fool...
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Security concerns are covered by File Vault outside of very few who are constrained by contractual obligations and if you don't back up your data more the fool...
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I actually would when it comes to drives with QLC NAND. When Samsung switched from MLC to TLC NAND, the 840 and 840 EVO series had an issue with read slowdown on old data and even occasional data loss (because the cells were leaking charge).
The controllers have gotten more sophisticated but the NAND itself has seen a decrease in P/E cycles albeit they've made up for that with higher capacities.
With that said, despite some initial concerns (I saw 1TB writes in a couple days of very light usage vs 15-20GB writes per day on Windows and have seen posts where several TB were written in just hours, possibly due to indexing), monitoring S.M.A.R.T. suggests it's highly unlikely the Mac's SSD will wear out on me before at least 10 years.
Thats so funny BTW.
On a slightly more serious note, would the dock icons over time cause image retention on IPS?
Like I said is the very least of my concerns. I've yet to have an SSD fail with my notebooks being employed professionally in engineering roles. This notebook is a mid range Asus gaming machine rerolled as a workstation and it's written close to 50TB on it's stock 256GB SSD yet still rates as being 87% reliable, by the time the OEM (cheap) SSD fails the notebook will be well and truly redundant.
The Apple SSD's are of a far higher quality, my old 2014 13" MBP re-rolled as a media server has written 100's of TB to it's internal 512 SSD. The OP's intention was clearly in good faith, however reflects a lack of knowledge regarding modern SSD's. Yes technically you would save wear & tear on the embedded SOC's SSD, equally there would be a trade off in performance. By the time the SSD had any serious wear you would be likely looking to replace the system due to performance and or security concerns.
My view may be skewed as I tend to only use the machines for 24-36 months professionally then replace, with the cast off gifted to the family. Sometimes they return and I find use for them such as the ill fated 2011 15" MPB which despite it's auto destruct dGPU remains to be 100% stock. In short it's a non issue, outside of random failure, which generally occurs in the first few months of use or at EOL.
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Reports have been surfacing lately about a worrying amount of SSD writes on the new machines.
That still does not make the original post sensible in any way, unless you are the kind of person that is constantly concerned about everything and keep the plastic wrap on your sofa.
Forget it and just enjoy your Mac, Apple designed them to be used. On an engineering project I hammer my Mac's & PC's never had an SSD fail as yet. The network & server guy's here will tell you the same it's non issue for the vast majority of use cases and even then were talking years to degrade the SSD...
The M1 Mac's are a solid design and worth the entry price, doubts? Have a quick search of my history pf just how highly I regard the 2016 MBP i.e. garbage from day one...
The 2nd Gen Apple Silicon systems we need to see how they fair reliability wise as Apple has screwed up significantly in the past, especially with the MBP. Current M1 has a tried & proven chassis/display, 3rd Gen will be the one to opt for if digging deep with the likes of a $4K+ 16" MBP. If one depends on the hardware for a living, then reliability is a significant factor.
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These two don't go well together. I depend on my M1 for a living. Three minutes after reading the first report about that I had smartctl installed and was checking my machine. Mine is fine.
And yet some of them are burning through their SSD lifespan literally an order of magnitude faster than they should.
Yes, unless there's a weird design flaw. I've seen people with 40+ TBW on M1s. That's definitely not okay, considering they're consumer grade TLC NAND.
The thing is, SSDs are NOT getting more and more durable with each generation and we have no idea how durable the M1 SSDs are.
There's one poster on the thread with 61.5 TBW, 4% Life Percentage Used on a 256GB SSD. That points to around 1.5 PBW total or roughly 6,000 P/E cycles.
The issue is that a lot of those people complaining are basing their concern on outdated information regarding SSD reliability. Modern SSDs are rated to last for years with relatively heavy usage, which is why you are seeing them used with increasing regularity in servers, RAID enclosures, and other high-demand applications. While the M1 could certainly use swap file more under certain conditions due to unified RAM, it wouldn't be enough of a difference to raise cause for concern.
You have to admit though that using 65 TB and 4% of the SSD lifespan in 21 days is problematic. This seems likely to be a OS bug. The M1 appears to be overly aggressive on writing to swap. It is hard to imagine any workload where that rate of usage is justified.
Assuming this is not an OS bug or a seriously misconfigured application, sounds like he is running some big jobs on a machine with not enough RAM if he's swapping terabytes of memory each day.
Do we have any evidence that this is specific to the M1-based machines and not a macOS Big Sur "feature" affecting both Intel and AS machines?
Want less swap...? Configure the machine with more real RAM.
Some evidence that it is not a problem in Big Sur in general. In the same thread the original poster has compared his use of an Intel MacBook Pro to his new M1 MacBook Air and is seeing different characteristics. It’s not definitive but it does suggest that the OS performs differently between the the two architectures.
https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ssd-swap-high-usage-of-terabytes-written.2284893/post-29610964
Presumably, the older Mac wasn't running the unreleased Big Sur yet for most of that period. We need to compare usage starting from after Big Sur was installed and compare that with the usage on M1 Macs.
I'd actually trust a Samsung 830 with MLC NAND over newer SSDs with TLC or QLC NAND in terms of P/E cycle wear/longevity.
Kind of a moot point, though. What does it matter to me if the SSD P/E cycles get used up at 50 years instead of 100?
For goodness sake lol, at what point is it just not worth bothering over this stuff (hint: way before you get to doing this!). Just get on and use the damn thing, make backups regularly and in the unlikely event it fails get it fixed or get a new one and move on.
Valid points, yet one would think that if there's a design flaw that all the M1 Mac's would react in the same manner? You would also expect to see some unusual numbers related to disk activity via Activity Monitor? If people are seeing 40TB/50TB in a matter of a few weeks something has to be writing the data or it's being misinterpreted simple as that.
I just restarted my own M1 MBP, writing a lofty 235MB. I'll see where it goes over the next few weeks. My other 13" MBP is an old Intel 2014 re-rolled as a media server it's averaged 5.5GB per day over the last 24 days.
I know sounds harsh, however if there's no observable issue then at a personal level I cant see or do much. I don't use the M1 heavily as yet as I'm more focused on getting it to do what I need, equally to all intents and purposes it's running as expected. Right now those seeing extreme writes to the SSD with no associated usage should place a support ticket with Apple. Not that they will put their hands up more to get the data into the system, equally I suspect that Apple would already be aware of such an issue given the extensive telemetry Apple acquires.
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This isn't using your sofa with the plastic wrap still on, it's more like driving a car with the engine rattling.
Some of these figures are way above anything you could expect a consumer grade SSD to endure.
edit: thought you were talking about the high-tbw issue, not about general usage and the ridiculous original post
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More like driving a car where there could be an issue with the engine affecting a small number of models. Either way what OP suggests is ludicrous. If you feel you need to be doing that perhaps this isn't the computer for you, look for a model with a replaceable SSD.
I believe the unusual numbers can be seen in Activity Monitor and that something is actually the kernel, which is why people immediately suspect M1's high swappiness.
Oh, I thought you were reacting to one of the latest posts.
Yes, the OP's suggestion is ridiculous. And the high number of writes does affect a small number of machines, yes, but those that are affected are affected quite a lot and the reasons are unclear.