When the first M1s came out there was an issue where the SSD seemed to be writing itself constantly until it would have been a few months away from failure, but we didn't really know whether it was due to actual excess writing to the SSDs or because of problems with the measurement tools that might have occurred during the switch. Has anyone seen the issue on new iMacs, now that we're about six months into M1? Is the system still showing the excess writes? Or is there hide nor hair of the mystery?
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Is the M1 iMac having excessive usage of the SSD?
- Thread starter CallMyBookie
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1) It was not a wide spread problem
2) Said problem has been overblown across Reddit and on this forum.
3) Several of those claiming to be affected have stated the 11.4 release fixed the problem.
2) Said problem has been overblown across Reddit and on this forum.
3) Several of those claiming to be affected have stated the 11.4 release fixed the problem.
This was only ever a theoretical issue. No one has experienced it.
Edit: To my knowledge. Please correct me if your SSD has actually failed.
Ah don't you love theorists ?
Theories that are imagined and then become rumors then the truth ....
They are out there....
I know this notion was being repeated by some when the new iMac was released as a criticism for sticking with a 256 or even 512 SSD as opposed to stepping up to order at least a 1TB SSD.
It is a thing, it's a thing on the Intel Macs as well.... it wouldn't be a problem if Apple didn't solder storage on. It happens on Windows as well, you'll have virtual memory that uses the SSD. However on Windows you can whack in 64GB of ram and turn off caching to the SSD, problem solved.
Apple is betting you will upgrade every 5 years though.
Apple is betting you will upgrade every 5 years though.
Your computer will die of other causes before the SSD fails due to excessive writes. I have read somewhere that some people have older drives that have exceeded the writes theorized to cause failures and the drives work fine.
It's one of those things like batteries. Your battery can retain 80% capacity after a certain amount of recharges. After that it might drop -- or it might not drop, or drop as much as that. Just like with the SSD, you can have a certain amount of writes before there is some likelihood of failure, but it doesn't mean that once your counter reaches that exact number the drive automatically dies and you're screwed.
Finally, this was an issue that seemed to affect very few people and has been resolved with software already. Even on articles discussing the problem they said if you have a bigger drive you lower the problem's severity because there is more sectors to spread the writes across. So if you go to a 512GB or 1TB drive and you barely even use that much capacity, even with units who had the problem it would not be as severe or kick in very quickly.
Conclusion: It's a non-issue that's not worth considering while deciding which Mac to buy at this time.
It's one of those things like batteries. Your battery can retain 80% capacity after a certain amount of recharges. After that it might drop -- or it might not drop, or drop as much as that. Just like with the SSD, you can have a certain amount of writes before there is some likelihood of failure, but it doesn't mean that once your counter reaches that exact number the drive automatically dies and you're screwed.
Finally, this was an issue that seemed to affect very few people and has been resolved with software already. Even on articles discussing the problem they said if you have a bigger drive you lower the problem's severity because there is more sectors to spread the writes across. So if you go to a 512GB or 1TB drive and you barely even use that much capacity, even with units who had the problem it would not be as severe or kick in very quickly.
Conclusion: It's a non-issue that's not worth considering while deciding which Mac to buy at this time.
My suggestion:
1. Ignore it.
2. Ignore it.
3. Ignore it.
Systems are designed to do what they do, they way they are designed to do it. If you have to tweak a brand-new system to avoid having a genuine problem, it's a bad system and needs to be returned.
1. Ignore it.
2. Ignore it.
3. Ignore it.
Systems are designed to do what they do, they way they are designed to do it. If you have to tweak a brand-new system to avoid having a genuine problem, it's a bad system and needs to be returned.
Internal drive dies.
Switch to external drives.
Speed may drop a little bit, it may looks less fascinating in benchmarking, but in general, it works, and you won't notice the slow-down in daily using, unless you are a hard-core pro, in which case you would already purchase another newer Macs.
I'm typing this on an iMac 2010, running Windows 10 64 on an external SSD inside a USB 2.0 box.
No problems, no hiccups at all for common tasks like Office, media consumption, web surfing, etc.
I have never owned any Macs with soldered in storage yet, but that'll change sometime in the next year or two probably.
The M1 is more of an entry level machine. Those who hammer the SSD heavily should be looking at the more professional machines coming later which are expected to have the option to have more than 16GB RAM.
The M1 is more of an entry level machine. Those who hammer the SSD heavily should be looking at the more professional machines coming later which are expected to have the option to have more than 16GB RAM.
You can turn off swap on macOS as well. I would not worry about it as its fixed in 11.4
Oh when Apple Silicon Macs come out with 32 GB or 64GB RAM it would be so nice. That is when I would upgrade my intel 16".
Apple rates their 256GB SSD's at 1600TBW. Their 1TB SSD's at 4800-5000TBW.
So keep calm and enjoy the Mac.
Well I don't buy them since they started soldering everything on, so not a problem for me.
There’s nothing wrong with swapping… your SSD won’t die because of swapping. This issue was excessive swapping. People reported insanely high numbers like terabytes a day. As long as swap works as it’s supposed to there’s nothing wrong with it.