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

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

3 hours ago, Froody129 said:

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?

the process is quite involved, but you can disable swap if you want. 

https://windsketch.cc/macbook-disable-swap/

[JamesTheFolf]

4 hours ago, just_dave said:

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

The most severe cases have "consumed" about 10-13% of the maximum warrantable TBW value of the SSDs (given their capacity & using values for equivalent market-available NVMe drives). 

 

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

I bought an M1 Macbook Air just a week ago and already have about 300GB of writes on the SSD after some light multitasking. I am currently considering returning it.

My post in r/Mac: 

Update 13:24

 

Would this be covered under the Macbook's warranty?

[n0stalghia]

On a slightly related note: how would I go about to check those statistics on Windows or Linux? I can't actually find much on Google, surprisingly...

[igormp]

39 minutes ago, n0stalghia said:

On a slightly related note: how would I go about to check those statistics on Windows or Linux? I can't actually find much on Google, surprisingly...

You can use smartctl on linux, here is a report from my 2~3 month olds NVMe disks:

 

[just_dave]

2 hours ago, jrhaberland said:

Would this be covered under the Macbook's warranty?

Nope. You'd have to be insane to kill it within US' 1 year warranty and it would also be pretty hard to kill within EU's 2 year warranty. Usually with really hard use it could fail in about 2.5 years and with mkre sensible but still intense use aboit 3.5-4 years.

[Orangeator]

Regardless of what the issue is, Apple needs to send out an update to either correct the incorrectly reported numbers, or they need to fix the issue causing these SSD's to be way over utilized. 

 

Also, this is why I personally would never buy a machine that has soldered on storage, what a horrible idea. 

[derr12]

i would avoid any soldered hard drive computer regardless of if its from apple or not.  Drives are the most likely thing to fail.   The hell is the point of soldering a drive vs soldering a sata interface the extra 3mm's of thin-ness?  It makes zero sense unless you are trying to force people to replace the whole thing when it inevitably fails. 

[JamesTheFolf]

1 hour ago, just_dave said:

Nope. You'd have to be insane to kill it within US' 1 year warranty and it would also be pretty hard to kill within EU's 2 year warranty. Usually with really hard use it could fail in about 2.5 years and with mkre sensible but still intense use aboit 3.5-4 years.

Ahhh, I see. Still tho I’ll probably use the same device til it stops receiving updates or I need a new one for my career.

 

So it would definitely be nice if they could optimize that to recuse wear on the ssd 

[kvuj]

Damn, this has made me more aware of my drive's health, thank you for this thread.

 

10 TB written for 2k hours (8-9 months) with 5% usage on Linux (256Gb).

 

This would last me 13 years. I guess I will probably change the SSD during that time (thank you dell for not soldering it ).

[wanderingfool2]

1 hour ago, derr12 said:

i would avoid any soldered hard drive computer regardless of if its from apple or not.  Drives are the most likely thing to fail.   The hell is the point of soldering a drive vs soldering a sata interface the extra 3mm's of thin-ness?  It makes zero sense unless you are trying to force people to replace the whole thing when it inevitably fails. 

I do agree there shouldn't be none-replaceable drives, but it's not like there isn't sometimes purposes behind doing so.

 

It does reduce the thickness, but it also likely is a cost saving measure.  With using a slot, you would have to likely do more work in getting the design correct (and installation correct)...all of which would add to the cost (to Apple).

 

 

In regards to the topic, hopefully this will end up being just a software reporting bug (and not actually real writes to the drive).  If it is putting this much writes on a drive, then really hope Apple fixes whatever is causing it (otherwise in a few years time, I could see so many people having to replace their systems).

 

2 hours ago, just_dave said:

Nope. You'd have to be insane to kill it within US' 1 year warranty and it would also be pretty hard to kill within EU's 2 year warranty. Usually with really hard use it could fail in about 2.5 years and with mkre sensible but still intense use aboit 3.5-4 years.

I would wonder whether you would find a lot more premature failures as people being people fill up their drives.  e.g. 50% - 60% full you could have a lot more wear on a few of the flash components (if the wear leveling isn't handle right)

[just_dave]

2 hours ago, derr12 said:

i would avoid any soldered hard drive computer regardless of if its from apple or not.  Drives are the most likely thing to fail.   The hell is the point of soldering a drive vs soldering a sata interface the extra 3mm's of thin-ness?  It makes zero sense unless you are trying to force people to replace the whole thing when it inevitably fails. 

Modern TLC is very good and soldered storage should be fine for 10 years under normal use. This isnt normal use tho.

 

[GDRRiley]

7 hours ago, leadeater said:

 

Power on hours for my SSD is ~57,000 hours, I think I got it in 2014 so 7 years. That's about 22 hours per day which is actually likely correct as I never turn my computer off and margin of error for when I actually purchased the computer. Definitely times where my PC is 'idle'.

I'll toss my data in
850 evo about 5 years old 36k on hours which makes sense. 24/7 360 with a few days off and I had it off 6 months. Its my main OS drive and its had 34TB written (44 days to write 1tb)
850pro unknown age but 19.7k hours and 6.2tb written
both are 500gb SSDs

 

[GDRRiley]

24 minutes ago, wanderingfool2 said:

It does reduce the thickness, but it also likely is a cost saving measure.  With using a slot, you would have to likely do more work in getting the design correct (and installation correct)...all of which would add to the cost (to Apple).

the fixed SSD doesn't matter in the mini. they've got enough space for a 3.5in HDD and a 2.5in SSD left

they can easily do a M.2
in the laptops it matters slightly more but still not really

now cost wise it should be cheaper long run because it means less stock needed for different configs
there isn't a good reason to not have removable storage and ram other than forcing people to pay

[BigDamn]

Why are people in this thread claiming that SMART status is incorrect just because their SSD power on hours seem off? SSD's have their own power management (Device Initiated Power Management) which controls when the device goes to sleep, thus stops logging power on hours. Different SSD's will behave differently, so POH won't always line up, but this has NOTHING to do with host writes. MacOS is clearly writing a significant amount of data to the SSD compared to other OS's, and with soldered on SSD's this is more than inexcusable.

 

To put it into perspective, my first SSD (Samsung 840 Evo 128gb) has a whopping 20TB written since I bought it in 2014. We have servers at work with 256gb Micron SSD's that have been in the field since 2014-2015 with a whopping 60-80TB written (constantly logging data). For a sub 1 year old laptop to be higher than either of these is unfathomable.

[Spindel]

13 minutes ago, BigDamn said:

Why are people in this thread claiming that SMART status is incorrect just because their SSD power on hours seem off? SSD's have their own power management (Device Initiated Power Management) which controls when the device goes to sleep, thus stops logging power on hours. Different SSD's will behave differently, so POH won't always line up, but this has NOTHING to do with host writes. MacOS is clearly writing a significant amount of data to the SSD compared to other OS's, and with soldered on SSD's this is more than inexcusable.

 

To put it into perspective, my first SSD (Samsung 840 Evo 128gb) has a whopping 20TB written since I bought it in 2014. We have servers at work with 256gb Micron SSD's that have been in the field since 2014-2015 with a whopping 60-80TB written (constantly logging data). For a sub 1 year old laptop to be higher than either of these is unfathomable.

Ok except the power on hours being impossibly low my SSD also reports it has never had another temperature than 28 degrees. 
 

I still don’t trust what these tool are reporting. And I’m still not worried about the amount of writes to my SSD

[just_dave]

Also guys, SATA SSD =! NVMe SSD. NVMe SSDs have very high power draw when under load, so they are likely staying in some sort of low-power state a lot, so thats why the hours are so low.

[leadeater]

53 minutes ago, Spindel said:

I still don’t trust what these tool are reporting. And I’m still not worried about the amount of writes to my SSD

Well hopefully this has created enough noise for Apple to look at it and make a statement, whatever that may be. Personally I'm not going to hang my hat on it definitely is actually writing that much data because it's just so far outside the realistic even for the proposed reason people are claiming. I want a lot more assurance that the data statistics is correct and reliable.

[LAwLz]

8 hours ago, n0stalghia said:

On a slightly related note: how would I go about to check those statistics on Windows or Linux? I can't actually find much on Google, surprisingly...

Find a program that can display S.M.A.R.T. data. I use CrystalDiskInfo.

 

 

4 hours ago, derr12 said:

i would avoid any soldered hard drive computer regardless of if its from apple or not.  Drives are the most likely thing to fail.   The hell is the point of soldering a drive vs soldering a sata interface the extra 3mm's of thin-ness?  It makes zero sense unless you are trying to force people to replace the whole thing when it inevitably fails. 

Ehm, drives are the most likely thing to fail? SSDs in general have very low failure rates. They are very, very reliable.

I would not have any problems buying a laptop with soldered on storage, at least not now that we got SSDs everywhere.

Batteries are, from my experience, far more likely to go bad or fail long long before the storage goes bad.

[Dr_Whom]

1 hour ago, LAwLz said:

 

Ehm, drives are the most likely thing to fail? SSDs in general have very low failure rates. They are very, very reliable.

I would not have any problems buying a laptop with soldered on storage, at least not now that we got SSDs everywhere.

Batteries are, from my experience, far more likely to go bad or fail long long before the storage goes bad.

Yea, working in repair HDD's used to be the most common failure, but since SSD's became more common storage replacement has become one of the least common repairs (those stupid piece of garbage intel optane combo drives are the exception). I'd say most common are fans, then batteries, and even LCD panel failure is more common (even if we only count natural failure and exclude cracked screens and other physical damage).

 

 

Of course though THE most common "failure" is people who buy a $2000 piece of electronic and use them as coasters. They then proceed to cuss you out and say you're a liar and ripping them off cause they claim they don't even drink liquids at all cause they survive off the sustenance of only sun light when you give them the quote to fix all the liquid damage.

[Kisai]

I would say fans, batteries, mechanical hard drives, charging/dc-in/usb-c ports and touchpad damage, in that order.

 

I have yet to swap a SSD in any Dell. Batteries on the other hand seem to have a high failure rate in user non-removable batteries.

[Fnige]

13 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

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

Dont challenge me

[descendency]

Maybe the 16GB version was a good idea...

[AndreiArgeanu]

Yeah, that's why I'm avoiding laptops with soldered storage. Used macbooks may become less feasible with time since now you have to worry about the SSD and how worn it is. I'd rather have a laptop with removable storage, knowing that when it fails I can replace it over having a laptop that turns into a brick once the ssd fails.

[Spindel]

6 hours ago, SlimyPython said:

Dont challenge me

DO IT!!!

[Spindel]

@just_dave it’s really confusing to have this discussion with you on 2 paralell forums