macOS Writing 8.5TB a Day to my M1 Mac Mini SSD

[nakquada]

So, I was doing a bit of housekeeping and decided to do a quick SMART check on my 1 year old M1 Mac Mini (8G/256GB). I use it every day as a daily driver for web development, nothing too stressful or resource hungry is ever running on it except Visual Studio Code and a browser with a handful of tabs open.

 

So imagine my surprise when I see that the drive is at 50% of its lifetime writes after it has written a RIDICULOUS 823TB of data to the drive over 95 days of power on time. That is approx 8.5TB a day, every day. Now I know that the low RAM in this device is reported to have resulted in a lot of swap to the SSD but this is definitely a huge problem for these machines. At this rate my drive will most likely fail in the coming months and when it does it's the end of my Mac Mini as it has the RAM and SSD soldered to the board and can't be replaced.

 

I have Samsung NVMe SSDs in my gaming rig that are years old and used every day and only have a few TBs of write cycles. I've been on to Apple support (absolutely useless when it comes to hardware issues) and my device is already out of it's one year warranty period.

 

Anyone else in the same boat?

 

 

[Vishera]

You will need to find out what process or program writes all of that data on your MacOS installation.

[nakquada]

It's macOS itself via kernel_task and not a 3rd party application.