kernel_task writing >2TB a month to SSD, Worried about SSD Lifespan

[darshkpatel]

kernel_task has been writing to the SSD like a mad man, it has > 2TB written in a month with 49TB Disk writes till date ( my MacBook is 8 months old) At this rate the SSD would die soon considering SSD's have limited disk writes. How do I stop this from happening / will my machine be fine?

I've already contacted AppleCare and followed their troubleshooting steps ( SMC and PRAM reset, New User, Clean Install, etc.) to no avail.

This is super frustrating with no idea on what's writing to the disk so much since kernel_task can be used by multiple system processes for handling disk IO.

System Details: MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2019, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports) 8GB Ram Running Catalina 10.15.7


I'm a system's administrator so I'm comfortable with the command line and any other technical tasks which anyone would require me to do to help debug this frustrating issue.

 

[glenthompson]

Unix does a lot of disk writes, log files and such. Your SSD should be good for over 3,000 writes per block. On a 512gb drive, that 1,500tb of writes. At your 2TB per month writes, that’s a life span of 62 years.

 

[johannnn]

This is not a 10 year old 1st gen SSD. Nowadays they can handle a lot of writes. A lot.

 

[darshkpatel]

Wow! That's reassuring
Thanks

 

[HDFan]

That seems about right. 57 TB in 8 months is about 7 TB/month. On my iMac I've gone through 232 TB in 29 months, which is ~8 TB a month. I'm still at 98% of my SSD lifetime, so I have a projected lifespan of 120 years if my math is correct.

I assume that the SSDs that Apple uses are at the high end of TBW.

 

[darshkpatel]

I must say MacOS writes a lot to the disk, most likely due to aggressive paging.

I've had an SSD on my old Linux Machine which I used pretty much all day and still had like 5TBW after a year.

Either way it seems like the high disk writes are nothing to worry about for modern SSDs as others pointed out.

 

[ArtOfWarfare]

My 2018 MBP running Catalina (10.15.7) somehow ran out of disk space today. kernal_task is just continuously writing 30-50 MB/s, so it's writing over a GB/minute... nevermind a month, it'll write 2 TB in about a day.

 

[saudor]

I think the SSD thing is a YMMV to some extent. Friend has a 2015 MBP 128gb and only used it for school, research etc. It dropped from 100% to just 13% health in just 4 years.Personally ive never had a SSD crap out but then again, i only use about 200-400gb writes a month.