M1 Mac owners are experiencing extremely high SSD writes over short periods of time, likely thanks to aggressive swap

[just_dave]

FOR NEWS SITES AND OUTLETS: DON'T MAKE THIS SEEM EXTREME, THE CAUSE IS UNCONFIRMED AND THIS IS NOT A PROBLEM FOR MOST USERS WHO DONT HAMMER THEIR MACHINES 

Some professional users of the new M1 Macbooks are experiencing extremely high drive writes over relatively short time.

IMPORTANT UPDATE:

 

 

 

This is likely macOS-related behaviour and Apple can fix it. 

 

Update 13:24

Update 2:

Update no. infinity:

 

 

[TrigrH]

inb4 intel add this to their crappy marketing campaign.

 

Context: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/intel-go-pc-ad-campaign-targets-apple

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

4 minutes ago, TrigrH said:

inb4 intel add this to their crappy marketing campaign.

oh i'm counting on it. 

[Drama Lama]

hehe  mAcKbO0kS sUcK

[Archer42]

Well, is not it brilliant?

Solder the ssd so that it cannot be replaced and machine is dead once its dead, limit warranty coverage based on TBW, make OS write whole bunch of stuff so that TBW limit is exhausted fast and the ssd is no longer covered by warranty. Sounds like fraud, does not it?

 

Honestly though - soldered storage is and always was terrible idea, and that's the reason i am personally staying away from many apple stuff nowadays, while i used to like it some time ago...

[Froody129]

Man, that sucks. Especially if you've bought a smaller drive size and using an external one for example. Can you not just adjust the page file size like on Windows?

[Spindel]

My M1 Mini that I have had since around 20 November 2020 (ordered it right after apple event).

 

Given I have 16 GB RAM so my computer doesn't page much.  

 

1,5 TB Written, screenshot taken right now.

 

But these what these tools report are questionable, the biggest one is: Since I'm working from home I'm working on the computer almost every day and these tools only report 95 hours power on, SINCE THE END OF NOVEMBER!

 

And even if I would have a higher data write count to me this is a nothing burger. 

 

 

 

[just_dave]

18 minutes ago, Spindel said:

My M1 Mini that I have had since around 20 November 2020 (ordered it right after apple event).

 

Given I have 16 GB RAM so my computer doesn't page much.  

 

1,5 TB Written, screenshot taken right now.

 

But these what these tools report are questionable, the biggest one is: Since I'm working from home I'm working on the computer almost every day and these tools only report 95 hours power on, SINCE THE END OF NOVEMBER!

 

And even if I would have a higher data write count to me this is a nothing burger. 

 

 

 

what app is that?

[Master Disaster]

Nevermind, turns out me no math good.

[Archer42]

3 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

How the holy hell can the system be writing over 2TB per minute?

You forgot to divide by 432, 191 and 256 respectively...

[Master Disaster]

Just now, Archer42 said:

You forgot to divide by 432, 191 and 256 respectively...

Did I? I'll be honest and say maths was never my strongest subject in school

 

Would you mind correcting me?

[leadeater]

Well to be honest I don't know what the fuss is, math below for why. A typical and conservative DWPD value for consumer SSD would be 0.2 and the Apple M1 devices have been around for what roughly 90 days?

 

(0.2 * 512GB) * 90 = 9216GB

(0.2 * 256GB) * 90 = 4608GB

 

So anyone with less than 4TB of data written is completely fine, your SSD is not wearing out abnormally, even if we use 0.1 DWPD anyone under 2TB is fine. And these DWPD/TBW warranty figures are actually well below what the SSD NAND is capable of.

 

I don't know what they are reading but I highly doubt anyone has used 13% of their expected SSD life.

 

Also FYI most SSDs in the consumer market are closer to 0.4 DWPD so.....

[leadeater]

1 minute ago, Master Disaster said:

Did I? I'll be honest and say maths was never my strongest subject in school

You also forgot to carry the 1.

[CarlBar]

8 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Did I? I'll be honest and say maths was never my strongest subject in school

 

Would you mind correcting me?

 

150TB in 432 hours is 5.79GB per minute.

 

15.7TB in 191 hours is 1.37GB a minute.

 

58TB in 256 hours is 3.78GB a Minute.

[X-System]

7 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Lets do some maths...

 

150TB written in 432 Hours.

150 / 60 gives us writes per minute in TB.

150 / 60 = 2.5TBpM

 

Case 2

15.6TB in 191 Hours.

15.6 / 60 = 0.26TBpM or 260GBpM.

 

Case 3

58TB in 256 Hours.

58 / 60 = 960GBpM.

 

How the holy hell can the system be writing over 2TB per minute? Honestly I'm thinking this is a sensor issue, if the system was continuously writing 2TB per minute to the SSD there would be no bandwidth left for anything else, just opening an app would take minutes (if not hours).

 

 

I would say : (150 / 432) / 60 = 0.0058 TBpM

 

When you write 150 / 60, it means 150 TB writes in one hour

[Archer42]

1 minute ago, Master Disaster said:

Would you mind correcting me?

 

6 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

150TB written in 432 Hours.

150 / 60 gives us writes per minute in TB.

150 / 60 = 2.5TBpM

Well, i'll take this as example.

It will be 150/432 ~ 0.35TB/h, or ~358GB/h

Then 358/60 ~ 6GB/m

Then 6/60 = 0.1Gb/s, or ~102MB/s.

 

Still a lot, but much less crazy...

[Master Disaster]

1 minute ago, CarlBar said:

 

150TB in 432 hours is 5.79MB per minute.

 

15.7TB in 191 hours is 1.37 MB a minute.

 

58TB in 256 hours is 3.78MB a Minute.

That makes much more sense, I thought was maths must have been off, 2TB per minute is impossible.

[leadeater]

12 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Nevermind, turns out me no math good.

To be honest, for one of your other points now gone, SMART data is known to be unreliable and even more so with SSD. A lot of SSD firmware don't count data written in an actually standard logical way so if you read it with a generic SMART reader it's going to be wrong. I only read drive wear using the vendor provided tools, at least that is slightly trustworthy.

[CarlBar]

3 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Well to be honest I don't know what the fuss is, math below for why. A typical and conservative DWPD value for consumer SSD would be 0.2 and the Apple M1 devices have been around for what roughly 90 days?

 

(0.2 * 512GB) * 90 = 9216GB

(0.2 * 256GB) * 90 = 4608GB

 

So anyone with less than 4TB of data written is completely fine, your SSD is not wearing out abnormally, even if we use 0.1 DWPD anyone under 2TB is fine. And these DWPD/TBW warranty figures are actually well below what the SSD NAND is capable of.

 

I don't know what they are reading but I highly doubt anyone has used 13% of their expected SSD life.

 

Also FYI most SSDs in the consumer market are closer to 0.4 DWPD so.....

 

I don't know what DWPD stands for but this makes no sense right now. Claiming anyone who's got less than 4TB written is fine seems a bit irellevent when the three examples @Master Disaster ran maths on, (however poorly), had values between 14.5 to 37. times. Which if i'm understanding the OP is the whole complaint.

[just_dave]

6 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Well to be honest I don't know what the fuss is, math below for why. A typical and conservative DWPD value for consumer SSD would be 0.2 and the Apple M1 devices have been around for what roughly 90 days?

 

(0.2 * 512GB) * 90 = 9216GB

(0.2 * 256GB) * 90 = 4608GB

 

So anyone with less than 4TB of data written is completely fine, your SSD is not wearing out abnormally, even if we use 0.1 DWPD anyone under 2TB is fine. And these DWPD/TBW warranty figures are actually well below what the SSD NAND is capable of.

 

I don't know what they are reading but I highly doubt anyone has used 13% of their expected SSD life.

 

Also FYI most SSDs in the consumer market are closer to 0.4 DWPD so.....

WD Black 2TB has 1200TBW. The guy with 2TB MBP has 150TBW written so far over 2mo. That is 12.5% of the TBW figure. His drive also used up 3% of spare blocks. If he carries on, the drive will reach 1200TBW in 16 months. After that it's unreliable and the drive could fail anytime (or keep working for another 100s of TBW)

[X-System]

2 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

 

150TB in 432 hours is 5.79MB per minute.

 

15.7TB in 191 hours is 1.37 MB a minute.

 

58TB in 256 hours is 3.78MB a Minute.

Not MB but GB

[CarlBar]

Just now, X-System said:

Not MB but GB

 

DoH correct. I was trying to do it quickly to get the thread updated, will go back and fix.

[CarlBar]

2 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

That makes much more sense, I thought was maths must have been off, 2TB per minute is impossible.

 

I misscarried a number so it's Gigabytes, not Megabytes, still not unrealistic for an SSD. Hell you could theoretically just about hit that on old fashioned IDE if you know what that is.

[leadeater]

17 minutes ago, CarlBar said:

 

I don't know what DWPD stands for but this makes no sense right now. Claiming anyone who's got less than 4TB written is fine seems a bit irellevent when the three examples @Master Disaster ran maths on, (however poorly), had values between 14.5 to 37. times. Which if i'm understanding the OP is the whole complaint.

Drive Writes per Day, and I'm telling you now none of those SMART readouts will be incorrect. Hell anyone can prove that easily, just open System Monitor and have it on the side and start using the M1 Mac device, unless you actually see this claimed very large writes then it's a load of crap and people are getting feed bad data.

[just_dave]

2 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Drive Writes per Day, and I'm telling you now none of those SMART readouts will be correct. Hell anyone can prove that easily, just open System Monitor and have it on the side and start using the M1 Mac device, unless you actually see this claimed very large writes then it's a load of crap and people are getting feed bad data.

If you go down the twitter thread, people are posting kernel_task values from their activity monitor. I restarted my Mac and from what i'm seeing so far, it could be a bug related to how long the machine has been last turned on