M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear

[robfoll]

Here is my M1 Macbook Pro showing 33% of drive life used and 338TB written to disc in approx 1000 hrs of runtime.
My Intel MacMini has used just 3% and written 87TB in over 4000 hrs!
Both Macs run identical apps and nothing at all unusual
No idea yet if 10.54 fixes the problem

 

[Tech198]

How does the software know it's evenly spread across the cells, if the OS does not even know where its written to ? That's the job of the SSD controller, the OS s entirely invisible to the SSD.

 

[jdb8167]

How does the software know it's evenly spread across the cells, if the OS does not even know where its written to ? That's the job of the SSD controller, the OS s entirely invisible to the SSD.

We have no idea how the M1 SSD controller works. It may very well be software running in the OS kernel. It is not a traditional NVMe drive with a separate controller chip but 2 NAND chips soldered to the motherboard with the controller part of the M1 SoC.

 

[AndyMacAndMic]

Here is my M1 Macbook Pro showing 33% of drive life used and 338TB written to disc in approx 1000 hrs of runtime.
My Intel MacMini has used just 3% and written 87TB in over 4000 hrs!
Both Macs run identical apps and nothing at all unusual
No idea yet if 10.54 fixes the problem

In your place I would not be a happy customer .
I hope Apple offers you a solution for this and that they will recognize that this sure is not a normal situation. If it happened to me I would contact customer support and ask them for a solution or a compensation in some form(ask them politely of course).

 

[mclld]

Here is my M1 Macbook Pro showing 33% of drive life used and 338TB written to disc in approx 1000 hrs of runtime.
My Intel MacMini has used just 3% and written 87TB in over 4000 hrs!
Both Macs run identical apps and nothing at all unusual
No idea yet if 10.54 fixes the problem

Wow that is crazy, I really want an M1 mini or air but this really keeps me from wanting to get one

 

[YanniDepp]

Here is my M1 Macbook Pro showing 33% of drive life used and 338TB written to disc in approx 1000 hrs of runtime.
My Intel MacMini has used just 3% and written 87TB in over 4000 hrs!
Both Macs run identical apps and nothing at all unusual
No idea yet if 10.54 fixes the problem

That's really not good.

Think about it this way. You've got a Mac with a 250GB SSD. In a few months, it has written 338TB. That's enough to completely wipe your SSD, fill it with data, then wipe it again 1,352 times!

This is an M1 Mac. This means you've had it less than a year. Why has your Mac written enough data to completely fill its SSD, wipe it, and fill it again over four times a day, every single day?

That's an utterly obnoxious level of wear in only a few months. I would be quite angry if that was my computer.

 

[toke lahti]

I’d guess that this involves 2 bugs: the other on how the usage is reported and the other is the excessive amount written.
And Apple will never admit both, without court.

 

[Maximara]

Here is my M1 Macbook Pro showing 33% of drive life used and 338TB written to disc in approx 1000 hrs of runtime.
My Intel MacMini has used just 3% and written 87TB in over 4000 hrs!
Both Macs run identical apps and nothing at all unusual
No idea yet if 10.54 fixes the problem

It is the OS or the programs you are running? Your wear is the worst (outside of that bank using an M1 as a postgres server) we have seen. More over how much RAM are the programs you running use? Do they like writing huge stratch files? There are many causes for this that may have nothing to do with what Apple does with the OS.

 

[Maximara]

Wow that is crazy, I really want an M1 mini or air but this really keeps me from wanting to get one

It is the OS or the programs you are running? Your wear is the worst (outside of that bank using an M1 as a postgres server) we have seen. More over how much RAM are the programs you running use? Do they like writing huge scratch files? There are many causes for this that may have nothing to do with what Apple does with the OS.

I’d guess that this involves 2 bugs: the other on how the usage is reported and the other is the excessive amount written.
And Apple will never admit both, without court.

As I will keep pointing out some of this is not Apple's fault. Some of it is people running way too many programs for the amount of RAM they got, running badly written/ported programs that love writing to the HD (Chrome), not having a big enough hard drive for what they need to do, or like that bank using the M1 in a way it was never designed for.

The reality is if this was only an Apple issue everyone would be seeing it (as with that buggy update we have last years). The fact is we aren't which makes me strongly suspect for many of these cases we have the software equivalent of mixing bleach and ammonia.

 

[09872738]

As I will keep pointing out some of this is not Apple's fault. Some of it is people running way too many programs for the amount of RAM they got, running badly written/ported programs that love writing to the HD (Chrome), not having a big enough hard drive for what they need to do, or like that bank using the M1 in a way it was never designed for.

Nah, sorry. That is total and utter nonsense.
A user is not supposed to track how many programs are open. And it has absolutely nothing to do with „poorly written apps“.
It is totally up to the operating system to properly manage the memory situation. And OSses are pretty good at that these days

 

[Cyprusian]

Nah, sorry.
A user is not supposed to track how many programs are open. And it has absolutely nothing to do with „poorly written apps“.
It is totally up to the operating system to properly manage the memory situation. And OSses are pretty good at that these days

Also, this issue appears to have arisen for M1 systems only, so if it were a systems/apps related issue it would be apparent with Intel-based systems as well. This doesn't appear to be the case. There is certainly no issue on my now vintage Intel-based machines with SSD storage.

I thought recent reports that the release of macOS 11.4 has now resolved this issue were encouraging.

 

[rmn1644]

Here's a look under the hood. Whats up with Messages wanting to read 1.62TB in 6 days.

My 4 month old Mac already at 13%. 400TB on a 512gb drive. I use primarily Brave with lots of tabs. Yes its obvious now I should have gotten 16gb of RAM (Gen1 is stopgap), but that doesn't excuse this.

Something doesn't seem "write" about all this, it will be interesting what the fix eventually is. Otherwise there are going to be a lot of Macs running off external hard drives!

EDIT:
1. Here's writes which is just as terrible but at least its presumably something useful like the kernel. but LaunchD?
2. Found a suggested wiki post to turn off some caching on Brave and seems like my data written/sec is down in the 50mb/sec instead of the 250-300mb/sec.

 

[jdb8167]

Whats up with Messages wanting to read 1.62TB in 6 days.

Reads don’t degrade your SSD.

 

[rmn1644]

Reads don’t degrade your SSD.

Cheers Mate, I did some research and saw that. Did you see bottom screenshot of the Writes? Thanks!

 

[SackJabbit]

I got my iMac/1TB/16MB 90 days ago, with a power on time of 15 days, and I decided to use DriveDx to check on my SSD Lifetime Left Indicator, and I was shocked to see it's down to 99.0% ! I have been using the same software for years on my MacBook Pro 2016/1TB/16GB, and only after 4 years of being power on most of the time and the same kind of usage, it's only down to 99.2%.

I realise that folks on the forum say there are so many possible variables, and may not be reliable indicator, or the swap file issue is a software cause. But what I would like to know is how does my warranty cover excessive wear. Is there a threshold to say, this is unacceptable level of wear and to the get Apple to replace my SSD or iMac? I should not have to worry about these things, and like others tell myself just to ignore "over-worrying" and use my iMac as normal, which is really high in multi-tasking. I should not have to change my usage patterns to accommodate this problem. But a drop in 1% in 15 days is really worrying. At this rate, I will wear the SSD down to 76% in a year. I have Apple Care, but I shouldn't have to wait for the SMART indicator tells me the overall health of my SSD is at critical level.

Has anyone had experience or advice how to go about returning my iMac is it reaches a certain level, and have them replace the SSD or iMac?

 

[robfoll]

My M1 Macbook Pro has now used 53% of SSD life since Nov 2020. Quite insane! And I continue to get mad runaway kernel task activity that I am convinced is the culprit. Apple phone support is so far useless, just want me to do standard basic troubleshooting, reinstall OS again and can't comprehend the problem. Does anyone know how to bypass the initial support and get escalated to real support? As we in Melbourne are locked down I can't get to an AppleStore

 

[George Dawes]

Excuse my stupidity , but what’s the best app to test your Mac’s ssd life ?

 

[robfoll]

Any app that reports SMART data. I use https://www.bresink.com/osx/TinkerToolSys7.html it's only $14 and does a huge amount of useful stuff.

 

[CMMChris]

My M1 Macbook Pro has now used 53% of SSD life since Nov 2020.

Jesus Christ, this is insane! This is how it should like for the average user (I got mine in November as well):

And I do push my machine quite a bit as well. I am regularly maxing the memory out during video editing, yet my SSD writes never went out of control from day one. This SSD writes issue keeps being one big mystery to me.

 

[EuroChilli]

I couldn't be bothered to installed any 3rd party monitoring tools.

Had my 8/256 M1 Air for about 3 months now. This is what activity monitor shows. Don't think I have anything to worry about.

Dumb question; are these stats from all time, or since the last boot? which was many weeks ago. I use my 'puter almost all day, every day.

What exactly are you doing with and what apps have y'all installed on your machines to be writing so much data and allegedly using 50+% of your SSD's life in a few months?

 

[opeter]

My M1 Macbook Pro has now used 53% of SSD life since Nov 2020. Quite insane! And I continue to get mad runaway kernel task activity that I am convinced is the culprit. Apple phone support is so far useless, just want me to do standard basic troubleshooting, reinstall OS again and can't comprehend the problem. Does anyone know how to bypass the initial support and get escalated to real support? As we in Melbourne are locked down I can't get to an AppleStore

And you know, what? If you SSD dies, you cannot boot you computer. At all.
Quite absurd, if you think about that.

 

[gank41]

I got mine in November, too, and it looks like 72.6 TB Written is only considered 1% used.. Cool?

 

[Maconplasma]

I got my iMac/1TB/16MB 90 days ago, with a power on time of 15 days, and I decided to use DriveDx to check on my SSD Lifetime Left Indicator, and I was shocked to see it's down to 99.0% ! I have been using the same software for years on my MacBook Pro 2016/1TB/16GB, and only after 4 years of being power on most of the time and the same kind of usage, it's only down to 99.2%.

I realise that folks on the forum say there are so many possible variables, and may not be reliable indicator, or the swap file issue is a software cause. But what I would like to know is how does my warranty cover excessive wear. Is there a threshold to say, this is unacceptable level of wear and to the get Apple to replace my SSD or iMac? I should not have to worry about these things, and like others tell myself just to ignore "over-worrying" and use my iMac as normal, which is really high in multi-tasking. I should not have to change my usage patterns to accommodate this problem. But a drop in 1% in 15 days is really worrying. At this rate, I will wear the SSD down to 76% in a year. I have Apple Care, but I shouldn't have to wait for the SMART indicator tells me the overall health of my SSD is at critical level.

Has anyone had experience or advice how to go about returning my iMac is it reaches a certain level, and have them replace the SSD or iMac?

Your biggest mistake is following a forum. Period. The rest of the real world uses their computers day in and day out without thinking of nonsensical things. Warranties cover malfunctions, not a forum’s version of “excessive SSD wear”.

 

[EuroChilli]

Your biggest mistake is following a forum. Period. The rest of the real world uses their computers day in and day out without thinking of nonsensical things. Warranties cover malfunctions, not a forum’s version of “excessive SSD wear”.

My 2011 MBP lasted 10 years, and is actually still working. If I had to have spent this much time analizing every possible wear and tear scenario I wouldn’t have just used the thing like I did, and still do. I’ll be happy if my M1 Air lasts half as long. I can spare 1000 bucks every 5 years or so, I earn more than that in a single month.

My sister has a 2013 MBP, the first one to come out with SSD. It still works. I think Jobs meant it when he said it.

 

[CPngN]

open Console.app , start the log stream, and see what it's bitching about. A lot of it is just overzealous logging, but sometimes we'll catch a process or two going crazy. Often they're Apple's processes.
I think the GBs of excessive writes are all logs. But the logs are truncated, so you shouldn't see disk USAGE rise forever, but if it's litterally writing all those logs out to disk (I'm not quite sure it is), that's a lot of busywork that few people ever need or see.
We have a Mac Mini running Big Sur.. still has a spinning HDD and Big Sur GRINDS THAT DRIVE TO DEATH. It got a little better after an update a few months ago, but... it's back. We no longer leave it on 24x7...