Is anyone getting high SSD writes on the new MPBs?

[badsimian]

Has anyone seen any excessive writes on the SSDs for their new Macbook pros? I haven't seen any reports myself but my base MBA still suffers a lot from this and I am hoping it is purely down to not having enough RAM. My new machine will have 32GB RAM and 1TB storage.

For those who don't know you can install smartmon tools via brew with

brew install smartmontools

and then run the test to see current values using

sudo smartctl –all /dev/disk0

My current values from my MBA are:-

=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        40 Celsius
Available Spare:                    100%
Available Spare Threshold:          99%
Percentage Used:                    2%
Data Units Read:                    131,309,760 [67.2 TB]
Data Units Written:                 78,576,404 [40.2 TB]
Host Read Commands:                 1,243,113,858
Host Write Commands:                358,850,325
Controller Busy Time:               0
Power Cycles:                       174
Power On Hours:                     510
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   25
Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
Error Information Log Entries:      0

 

[PikachuEXE]

Have you checked the RAM & swap usage in Activity Monitor?

 

[badsimian]

Yes and I am usually in yellow with 3-4GB in swap used. 370GB written by kernel task since I last rebooted yesterday.

 

[ASX]

370 gb in 1 day? Means 135 tb per year. Lol. The 512 gb ssd has only 200 - 300 tb write duration.

On my 32 gb ram 1 tb ssd mbp 2021 i have seen no swap. But it was only using 12-13 gbyte ram.

 

[TheSynchronizer]

I had this same issue on my outgoing 8gb m1 mbp, and I can confirm I write a lot less on my base 14, to the point where I’m nowhere near in the region where I would worry about it at all. Currently i’m writing ~45 GB a day on 10 days uptime so far, including a monterey update that counts towards the writes.

 

[badsimian]

I had this same issue on my outgoing 8gb m1 mbp, and I can confirm I write a lot less on my base 14, to the point where I’m nowhere near in the region where I would worry about it at all. Currently i’m writing ~45 GB a day on 10 days uptime so far, including a monterey update that counts towards the writes.

That's good to hear thanks, with my 32GB I should get even less writing than that.

 

[TheBigApple2006]

370 gb in 1 day? Means 135 tb per year. Lol. The 512 gb ssd has only 200 - 300 tb write duration.

On my 32 gb ram 1 tb ssd mbp 2021 i have seen no swap. But it was only using 12-13 gbyte ram.

On my Mac Mini 2018, with 32GB ram, I have 398TB read, 350TB written, on the internal 512GB SSD. So does this mean my SSD is about to fry? I doubt it...

 

[TheSynchronizer]

That's good to hear thanks, with my 32GB I should get even less writing than that.

Indeed, I wouldn’t worry at all.

It’s also been widely established that the SSDs in these newer (2020+) macs have TBW in the range of at least 1200 TB, as indicated by the percentage of lifetime used statistic that was being reported by M1 macs in one of the threads from last year that I was a part of.

So truthfully even the base m1 macs that swap so much generally don’t have anything to worry about.

Enjoy your mac

 

[ASX]

On my Mac Mini 2018, with 32GB ram, I have 398TB read, 350TB written, on the internal 512GB SSD. So does this mean my SSD is about to fry? I doubt it...

Maybe mlc nand. The newer ssds have tlc with much less tbw.