When do we start the betting pool on number of days between Apple making that determination and Apple announcing their large-scale repair program?
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M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear
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When do we start the betting pool on number of days between Apple making that determination and Apple announcing their large-scale repair program?
what grade are these SSDs? TLC?
I’m rusty but aren’t even the cheap ones meant to take a read / write (especially write) beating?
Recent MacOS writes at an incredible rate. My MBP 16" comes in around half the numbers posted for the M1s and shows the same ratio of read and write roughly equal. So while there's something about the M1, it's only a single-digit factor over what is probably an order of magnitude for MacOS itself over earlier versions and other OS's.
I've spent a bit of time trying to track down where all the writing comes from. Activity Monitor's Disk tab is pretty useful. In my case 25% of the writing goes to launchd (I don't know if that's its own logging or that of processes it manages), then 20% to the kernel (same question), and another 20% to mds/spotlight. The remaining 35% are a mix of heavy-hitter apps like Safari (writing its cache, no doubt) and other system services. (EDIT: I have 32GB RAM and have never seen <10G free so swap shouldn't be at issue.)
I hope the fact that the M1 seems to exacerbate it will get Apple engineering attention directed to the causes.
I've spent a bit of time trying to track down where all the writing comes from. Activity Monitor's Disk tab is pretty useful. In my case 25% of the writing goes to launchd (I don't know if that's its own logging or that of processes it manages), then 20% to the kernel (same question), and another 20% to mds/spotlight. The remaining 35% are a mix of heavy-hitter apps like Safari (writing its cache, no doubt) and other system services. (EDIT: I have 32GB RAM and have never seen <10G free so swap shouldn't be at issue.)
I hope the fact that the M1 seems to exacerbate it will get Apple engineering attention directed to the causes.
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What do you mean? The new SSDs literally have a limit that is specified by the manufacturer and that is being consumed at an alarming rate. What other "new spec" knowledge do you want?
Also, this doesn't appear to have anything to do with the amount of RAM, since people with large amounts of it in their computers are also experiencing this issue.
For me, this sounds like a (very) severe software issue that is resulting in absurd amounts of RAM memory being consumed, that eventually need to be swapped to disk due to its size. Still, I'd love to hear more about people that know more about this than I do.
Apple's next move : smartmontools and other tools can no longer be run on M1 macs.
For the reported 1% wear in 2 months: That's 8+ years before TBW. Now, the 3% wear is worrying. To be fair though, MacOS and Mac apps aren't the only software writing data to the SSD. There are lots of possibilities; we'll have to wait to see what the root cause is (and it may not be one factor involved). One candidate that comes to mind is data/file syncing applications, cloud-based or otherwise. Depending on how these are configured, e.g. volume and frequency of syncs, they can be very hard on SSD storage.
It’s the Tesla problem all over again. Flash storage wear is inevitable
Let’s wait for Apple’s press release. I sure hope that their ‘small’ percentage of user statement is true this time.
It shouldn't be happening even with 8 GB RAM. I highly doubt this is due to swap but we will see.
And for something as major as a CPU architecture change, I'd give apple at least 3-4 versions to get the bugs worked out.
From the imore article: "As PC Gamer notes in its report, smart monitoring tools "are notorious for misreporting" and this could be an M1 teething problem."
Not going to sweat it... yet.
Not going to sweat it... yet.
Pretty sure apple never said anything like this. It was dumb YouTubers who said 8gb is enough
I agree. I remember the Spotify bug before that kept writing data over and over.
The guys on Mac Pro forum says Apple is using a highly durable NAND instead of standard SSD tech.
For comparison this is from my M1 Air with 16GB RAM and 256GB SSD.
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 48 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 0%
Data Units Read: 7,105,688 [3.63 TB]
Data Units Written: 3,318,085 [1.69 TB]
Host Read Commands: 113,745,947
Host Write Commands: 50,687,410
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 169
Power On Hours: 70
Unsafe Shutdowns: 3
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 48 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 0%
Data Units Read: 7,105,688 [3.63 TB]
Data Units Written: 3,318,085 [1.69 TB]
Host Read Commands: 113,745,947
Host Write Commands: 50,687,410
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 169
Power On Hours: 70
Unsafe Shutdowns: 3
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
No question but the issue is excessive wear, whether its due to lack of RAM or some sort of bug. Because the SSDs are soldered onto the logic board, you're pretty much screwed and cannot replace them
Launch day M1 MBA 8/8/16/512
![GIbqpfz.png]()
This looks fairly normal to me.
This looks fairly normal to me.
Where I work, staff laptops get replaced every 3, 4 or 5 years. So I hope it's just a software bug.
Sure! This guy is skeptical but raises the issue, recommends 16 gb:
Also skeptical but again raises the issue, recommends 16 gb:
There's plenty more if you search
TOSHIBA/KIOXIA TLC NAND according to ioreg:
Knowledge/articles/Exploring_Apple_Silicon_on_MacBookAir10.md at master · ThomasKaiser/Knowledge
Contribute to ThomasKaiser/Knowledge development by creating an account on GitHub.
github.com
Nobody asked the specs or durability of the drives yet. Without this knowledge the discussion is like a waste of energy for people to lose their nuts about on the internet.
You also have to question the people who are seeing high “wear”. How much RAM do they have? Are they spending 20 hours a day on torrent and video streaming? Is there any slow down in the drive?
Debating between TLC or even QLC since that's what the Q might be in SSD part # AP0256Q. Storage feels slow like eMMC on mine so wouldn't be surprised it's QLC. When an app is launched that's not cached in RAM it bounces several times before opening.
Consuming 1% of the warranty in 2 months sounds okay to me... that means the SSD's warranty is good for 200 months = 16 years, 8 months.
Was anyone really buying a computer thinking it could serve as their primary device for that long? How many people are still using computers from 2004 as their primary device?
Edit to add - this is just the warranty limit. I'd guess that most of the SSDs can survive 20+% more writes than they're warrantied for, so we're probably looking at it working for 15-20 years.
Was anyone really buying a computer thinking it could serve as their primary device for that long? How many people are still using computers from 2004 as their primary device?
Edit to add - this is just the warranty limit. I'd guess that most of the SSDs can survive 20+% more writes than they're warrantied for, so we're probably looking at it working for 15-20 years.
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I bought the M1. I have AC+.
I use it and don't worry about all the "scary things" of a first gen product.
I'm loving the machine and if the time comes that I have an issue with it, I'll deal with it because the benefits versus my 16" i9 definitely outweigh any perceived or theoretical issues.
I use it and don't worry about all the "scary things" of a first gen product.
I'm loving the machine and if the time comes that I have an issue with it, I'll deal with it because the benefits versus my 16" i9 definitely outweigh any perceived or theoretical issues.
Apple would never say 8GB is enough for any advanced user. The machines released so far are super fast but face it guys they are base model intro machines.