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Does Apple Care cover SSD wear?

M

meme1255

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 15, 2012
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Czechia
Hello,
I've taken a look into the SSD stat's recently and I've been a little bit shocked - even though I am aware (and have filed 3 bug reports) that macOS swapping/memory management isn't working correctly and huge swap file is generated as a result, I didn't expect that my lifetime has gone from 100 to 83 procent in 15 months. If it goes to zero under AppleCare validity (yet over 1.5 year remains), will Apple exchange the drive?
 
meme1255 said:
Hello,
I've taken a look into the SSD stat's recently and I've been a little bit shocked - even though I am aware (and have filed 3 bug reports) that macOS swapping/memory management isn't working correctly and huge swap file is generated as a result, I didn't expect that my lifetime has gone from 100 to 83 procent in 15 months. If it goes to zero under AppleCare validity (yet over 1.5 year remains), will Apple exchange the drive?
Click to expand...
If your drive stops working because it can’t be written to due to SSD wear, Apple will replace it if under warranty or apple care.
 
OP:

Couple of questions:
How large is the SSD?
How much RAM do you have installed?

Apple will certainly "cover it" an SSD replacement AppleCare, but my guess is that they will only offer a new one AFTER the old drive "has failed".

If you have enough RAM, you could disable VM disk swapping, avoiding all the "page ins" and "page outs".

I've been doing that on my Macs for years, with NO ill effects.
They run just fine.
I do exercise care in not keeping too many apps open at once...
 
But ...
"wear" is not a direct predictor of failure. End-of-life (0% life remaining) is an arbitrary reporting indicator of theoretical end-of-life.
bottom line: Your SSD will not suddenly stop working because of an arbitrary engineering estimate of lifetime for your SSD.
In OP's example: Assuming the same wear rate (1.13% per month), you would use your SSE for at least 6 more years before the indicator shows 0%. (well beyond any warranty)
Again, 0% is just a number, and does not trigger an immediate full-stop, never to work again.
Even then, the OP's SSD has another 6 years before wear approaches 0%
From what I have read, an SSD might fail, but more often reasons not related to wear.
 
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Fishrrman said:
OP:

Couple of questions:
How large is the SSD?
How much RAM do you have installed?

Apple will certainly "cover it" an SSD replacement AppleCare, but my guess is that they will only offer a new one AFTER the old drive "has failed".

If you have enough RAM, you could disable VM disk swapping, avoiding all the "page ins" and "page outs".

I've been doing that on my Macs for years, with NO ill effects.
They run just fine.
I do exercise care in not keeping too many apps open at once...
Click to expand...
It's the one in my signature: 16G RAM; 512G SSD. I'm a little bit worried to disable swapping as I have quite often plenty of Safari tabs open and for example MATLAB sometimes leaks memory and takes even 8G of memory which could end up very badly.




DeltaMac said:
But ...
"wear" is not a direct predictor of failure. End-of-life (0% life remaining) is an arbitrary reporting indicator of theoretical end-of-life.
bottom line: Your SSD will not suddenly stop working because of an arbitrary engineering estimate of lifetime for your SSD.
In OP's example: Assuming the same wear rate (1.13% per month), you would use your SSE for at least 6 more years before the indicator shows 0%. (well beyond any warranty)
Again, 0% is just a number, and does not trigger an immediate full-stop, never to work again.
Even then, the OP's SSD has another 6 years before wear approaches 0%
From what I have read, an SSD might fail, but more often reasons not related to wear.
Click to expand...

SSD wear == 0 % means that the drive is becoming unreliable as the stability of the charge in NAND cells cannot be guaranteed anymore as there are no replacement cells available.
 
In the nearly 2 years I've owned my 1TB 2017 MBP I've written almost 26TB to it. ALL my data is <360GB (that includes OS, pictures, everything). Life shows 100% still, but that could be because it is a 1TB.

driveDX is what I use https://binaryfruit.com/drivedx to read the health of the drive.

My Mac is very aggressive with swap but 100% after 2 years I'm not going to worry about it.

Where are you seeing your life %?
 
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How long do you think that process (SSD wear drops to 0%) will take?
Assuming that you can believe that 0 % is an absolute value (and not a more or less arbitrary reported value), you STILL have more than 6 more years (just using the figures that you reported here :cool:)
 
DeltaMac said:
How long do you think that process (SSD wear drops to 0%) will take?
Assuming that you can believe that 0 % is an absolute value (and not a more or less arbitrary reported value), you STILL have more than 6 more years (just using the figures that you reported here :cool:)
Click to expand...

You have to take the amount of consumed space into account. If you're the kind of person that keeps their drive perpetually 95% full (which is quite easy to do with only 512GB of storage), you're going to see performance issues long before you reach 0%
 
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Is not the lifespan of the SSD given as "TBW", Terabytes Written? For example 300 TBW for a Samsung 970 EVO Plus / 512 GB. Is the "lifetime" based on this measure or is it based on remaining spare cells?

I am curious because in my work on embedded systems we regard the failure rate for electronics to be constant :eek: . It is typically given as the probability of a failure in the next hour, e.g. 2E-7 for a small processor.

The Mean Time To Fail is then just the inverse. But note that it is the MEAN time. The part could fail immediately or last twice as long, as there typically for normal electronics is no "aging" effect.
 
Mine is 295/207 TB R/W since 9/2018.

I've used ~400 GB out of 500 G. I try to keep 10-20 % free.
[automerge]1582222991[/automerge]
matram said:
Is not the lifespan of the SSD given as "TBW", Terabytes Written? For example 300 TBW for a Samsung 970 EVO Plus / 512 GB. Is the "lifetime" based on this measure or is it based on remaining spare cells?

I am curious because in my work on embedded systems we regard the failure rate for electronics to be constant :eek: . It is typically given as the probability of a failure in the next hour, e.g. 2E-7 for a small processor.

The Mean Time To Fail is then just the inverse. But note that it is the MEAN time. The part could fail immediately or last twice as long, as there typically for normal electronics is no "aging" effect.
Click to expand...

According to this Crucial-written document it seems that answer to you assumption is something like "Well, yes, but actually no". See attribute 202.
 
Last edited:
Generally the TBW increase proportionally to the size of the SSD. So getting a larger drive and using a smaller fraction of it increase lifespan.

Personally I try to use around 50% of my drive (1.03 of 2 TB).
 
meme1255 said:
According to this Crucial-written document it seems that answer to you assumption is something like "Well, yes, but actually no". See attribute 202.
Click to expand...

Interesting document. Answers several questions I have had about SSDs. Guess I will not worry too about my drives. And since I keep things properly backed up (all critical data in 3 places, in at least 2 separate physical locations) I can always restore.
 
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I just tried DriveDx on my 2013 15" rMBP with a 500GB SSD. 111TBW, and I try to keep 15-20% free.
 
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