M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear

[toke lahti]

My int.ssd being quite full (70%) does no harm, since I don't use it.

But let's say that the ssd in use is 90% full. The rest 10% is used for swapping. After same clusters have been written for let's say 100 times, wouldn't it be clever to to write something that is moved really rarely to that block and use the blocks that just got available and have been written only few times?

Does ssd's do that? If they do, is it on OS level or inside the ssd, behind the controller, so OS doesn't even see it?

 

[jdb8167]

My int.ssd being quite full (70%) does no harm, since I don't use it.

But let's say that the ssd in use is 90% full. The rest 10% is used for swapping. After same clusters have been written for let's say 100 times, wouldn't it be clever to to write something that is moved really rarely to that block and use the blocks that just got available and have been written only few times?

Does ssd's do that? If they do, is it on OS level or inside the ssd, behind the controller, so OS doesn't even see it?

Yes. SSDs do what is called wear leveling. They move around blocks of data to make sure no one block is written to more often than another. On the Apple silicon Macs, Apple designed the SSD controller. We don’t know how much of the SSD inner workings are done by the controller vs. the OS.

 

[Maximara]

Interesting. Now this is purely anecdotal and probably not related to anything, but why didn't we see this during the first PPC - Intel Rosetta? I know we were still on HDDs back then and HDD wear is not the same as SSD wear, but I don't remember my drive being chewed up by PPC versions of CS2.

PPC - Intel Rosetta worked differently and didn't write "translated" code to the drive like Rosetta 2 does. Also programs were way smaller and simpler than they are now.

 

[toke lahti]

PPC - Intel Rosetta worked differently and didn't write "translated" code to the drive like Rosetta 2 does. Also programs were way smaller and simpler than they are now.

I’d guess that the main difference is available hard disk space.

 

[tskwara]

When I ordered my Mac Studio, I choose 128GB RAM and 4TB SSD. When running Xcode, a RAMDrive is configured for 32GB of RAM and is used as the 'scratch drive', where thousands of files get written/read/erased daily. This was to avoid access SSD wearing.

 

[jdb8167]

When I ordered my Mac Studio, I choose 128GB RAM and 4TB SSD. When running Xcode, a RAMDrive is configured for 32GB of RAM and is used as the 'scratch drive', where thousands of files get written/read/erased daily. This was to avoid access SSD wearing.

I probably wouldn’t worry about the SSD wear but your solution also has the advantage that it should be considerably faster.

 

[rmn1644]

Anyone ever have failures of these M1 drives or SMART warnings? My new M3 Macbook Pro is already at 70TBW!

 

[Mike Boreham]

Anyone ever have failures of these M1 drives or SMART warnings? My new M3 Macbook Pro is already at 70TBW!

Not that I have read anywhere.

This post is by someone who has written 1.15 Petabytes in three years of heavy use with no ill effects reported. 36% of disk life used.

 

[Populus]

If the problem continues at this rate, if they switch to QLC NAND it’s gonna be a bad situation for those that hold on their macs for many years (almost 10 in my case). A replacement of the SSD could entail the replacement of the whole motherboard, which is pricy.

 

[BrianM_CAN]

Place I work have around 10 M1 and M2 MacBook Airs, with a few 14 & 16" MacBook Pro's now - (M3's will be soon replacing some 2018 & 2019 intel models). Nothing with less than 16 GB of ram. I just checked a couple of M1 Air's and an M1 13" MBP, all are about 20-25 TB written, still showing 99% spare under 1% used. I should get smartmontools onto more of the systems to double-check the data

At least in theory (I haven't had a chance to test yet) even with a failed/failing internal SSD, you could run the system from an external NVMe SSD through USB-C or Thunderbolt - not ideal for laptops, but ok for desktops. I suspect things may not work if the internal SSD is completely dead, but haven't seen proof one way or another. I have run M1 Mac mini and an Air off of an external SSD a couple of times to know that it works (and the first time was to recover an M1 Mac mini that suddenly stopped booting macOS 11 at the time - it couldn't even boot the recovery)

 

[ksec]

Anyone ever have failures of these M1 drives or SMART warnings? My new M3 Macbook Pro is already at 70TBW!

Do you use a lot of Tabs in Safari?

 

[rmn1644]

Do you use a lot of Tabs in Safari?

Lots and I use Brave

 

[ksec]

Lots and I use Brave

If you have lots of Tabs in Safari ( 100+ ), you will likely run into excessive paging. This has been an issue with Safari for 8 years and counting. All Applications does this when they run of memory, including Chrome and Firefox. But Safari is worst of all. You could easily have Tabs reloading themselves in the background without you doing anything and write 200- 500GB to SSD just because of that.

Cant comment on Brave, but it is based on Chrome so it should be similar.

 

[summerz]

Apple should go back to SLC SSDs, they had no issues.
SLC SSDs are also the fastest and most durable SSD type.

 

[ksec]

Apple should go back to SLC SSDs, they had no issues.
SLC SSDs are also the fastest and most durable SSD type.

There is really no need for SLC. With a decent SSD controller Modern MLC or even TLC is fast enough for quite literally everything consumer or even professional usage.

The problem here is that Apple's memory paging is a software issue. And goes back to days before SSD was even a thing.

 

[Mike Boreham]

The issue is not all about paging. Paging may indeed be a factor for some people, but from the megathread there are other causes.

 

[riverwood]

It also seems to be related to the capacity left on the SSD. If the SSD has less than 20% capacity left, it will exponentially start to wear and tear much faster, than if the SSD had used less than 20% of full capacity. In other words, if you want the SSD to last for many years, store only macOS on the SSD, while using an external SSD for everything else.

 

[Mike Boreham]

The issue is not all about paging. Paging may indeed be a factor for some people, but from the megathread there are other causes.

To support this, below are my Activity Monitor screens for two recent typical days. Note AM resets on reboot so the screenshots show the time since last boot for iStat:

First day 405GB in 24h 14m
Second day 345GB in 21h 22m

Average just under 400 GB per day. This typical of the worst spells since I got the machine in January 2023. See below. I have no explanation for the difference between the red and green periods.

There was no SWAP used on these days and I did only very minor work in Photos which seems to have been very busy. The machine is on 24/7. Other use has been emails, browsing with 2/3 tabs in Safari. Simple Numbers spreadsheet updating. The Mac is a 2TB M2 MBA with 1.3TB used.

Because the machine is 2TB SSD Life used is 1% in Drive DX, so I am not worried about this but I am interested.

 

[Mike Boreham]

To support this, below are my Activity Monitor screens for two recent typical days. Note AM resets on reboot so the screenshots show the time since last boot for iStat:

First day 405GB in 24h 14m
Second day 345GB in 21h 22m

Average just under 400 GB per day. This typical of the worst spells since I got the machine in January 2023. See below. I have no explanation for the difference between the red and green periods.

There was no SWAP used on these days and I did only very minor work in Photos which seems to have been very busy. The machine is on 24/7. Other use has been emails, browsing with 2/3 tabs in Safari. Simple Numbers spreadsheet updating. The Mac is a 2TB M2 MBA with 1.3TB used.

Because the machine is 2TB SSD Life used is 1% in Drive DX, so I am not worried about this but I am interested.

View attachment 2372713 View attachment 2372714 View attachment 2372715

Just a small follow up on this, I took a screenshot of AM just before going to bed and another when I got up this morning.

In this 9h 26m period that the machine was unused, the TBW increased by 146 GB.

The biggest contributors to the overnight increase were:

corespotlightd +64
launchd +25
photolibraryd +10
backupd +9
kernel task +12

So one factor in my case is that, having a large amount of data in and connected to the machine causes Spotlight to grind away writing to the disk 24/7.

I have a 2TB internal, a 4TB Time Machine drive and a 4TB backup drive connected 24/7.

 

[toke lahti]

It also seems to be related to the capacity left on the SSD. If the SSD has less than 20% capacity left, it will exponentially start to wear and tear much faster, than if the SSD had used less than 20% of full capacity. In other words, if you want the SSD to last for many years, store only macOS on the SSD, while using an external SSD for everything else.

You do know, that ssd moves data from areas with low write times to areas where it is high, to free space from areas that are not worn out for frequent writing like swapping?

 

[toke lahti]

To support this, below are my Activity Monitor screens for two recent typical days. Note AM resets on reboot so the screenshots show the time since last boot for iStat:

First day 405GB in 24h 14m
Second day 345GB in 21h 22m

Average just under 400 GB per day. This typical of the worst spells since I got the machine in January 2023. See below. I have no explanation for the difference between the red and green periods.

There was no SWAP used on these days and I did only very minor work in Photos which seems to have been very busy. The machine is on 24/7. Other use has been emails, browsing with 2/3 tabs in Safari. Simple Numbers spreadsheet updating. The Mac is a 2TB M2 MBA with 1.3TB used.

Because the machine is 2TB SSD Life used is 1% in Drive DX, so I am not worried about this but I am interested.

View attachment 2372713 View attachment 2372714 View attachment 2372715

Where do you get the data to TBW chart?

 

[Mike Boreham]

Where do you get the data to TBW chart?

I use DriveDx but you can use smartmontools which is free but not so convenient. They report the same numbers.

This site makes getting started with smartmontools easy.

 

[toke lahti]

I use DriveDx but you can use smartmontools which is free but not so convenient. They report the same numbers.

This site makes getting started with smartmontools easy.

I’m looking for an app that turns WRITES to all-time statistics, maybe write that value once a minute to certain database.

Smartmontools and apps that are based on it (like DriveDX) have one big problem: if you boot from external drive (like I do with my mini), you can’t monitor those boot drives or actually no external drives at all.

Smartmontools for mac is ancient code and the maker has gone silent a long time ago.

There are free GUIs to smartmontools like: https://www.corecode.io/smartreporter/

 

[Mike Boreham]

I’m looking for an app that turns WRITES to all-time statistics, maybe write that value once a minute to certain database.

Smartmontools and apps that are based on it (like DriveDX) have one big problem: if you boot from external drive (like I do with my mini), you can’t monitor those boot drives or actually no external drives at all.

Smartmontools for mac is ancient code and the maker has gone silent a long time ago.

There are free GUIs to smartmontools like: https://www.corecode.io/smartreporter/

DriveDx will work with external Thunderbolt (TB3/TB4) drives but not USB. The SATSMART driver will enable some USB externals to work.

 

[celtica]

Why did Apple solder the SSD and RAM?
Don't they realize how much e-waste this will generate?