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M1 Mac Users Report Excessive SSD Wear

Is it just me or did no one read this part...."It is not known how widespread the TBW issue is, but reports of strange SSD behavior are also now emerging from users with Intel-based Macs, suggesting that the TBW issue may not be exclusive to ‌M1‌ Macs."

So maybe hold off on bashing the M1 until we know for sure.
 
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ArPe said:
Nobody asked the specs or durability of the drives yet. Without this knowledge the discussion is like a waste of energy for people to lose their nuts about on the internet.

You also have to question the people who are seeing high “wear”. How much RAM do they have? Are they spending 20 hours a day on torrent and video streaming? Is there any slow down in the drive?
Click to expand...

It is entertaining watching the inane sky-is-falling posts based solely on a couple of tweets and an iMore story. Wish I could say I'm astonished.
 
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M1 MBP 8GB/512GB with Mountain Duck (Gdrive)/iCloud Drive/Dropbox. 8 weeks now.

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

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning: 0x00
Temperature: 35 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 1%
Data Units Read: 82,821,559 [42.4 TB]
Data Units Written: 75,477,358 [38.6 TB]
Host Read Commands: 385,423,895
Host Write Commands: 207,042,335
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 82
Power On Hours: 122
Unsafe Shutdowns: 4
Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0
Error Information Log Entries: 0
 
Jason2000 said:
Is it just me or did no one read this part...."It is not known how widespread the TBW issue is, but reports of strange SSD behavior are also now emerging from users with Intel-based Macs, suggesting that the TBW issue may not be exclusive to ‌M1‌ Macs."

So maybe hold off on bashing the M1 until we know for sure.
Click to expand...
It might as well be a Big Sur problem as well.
 
There's gotta be another angle here re: what software is being used on the machine and/or how it's being used.

I'm a fairly heavy data user and I've written and unloaded many terabytes of data over the few months I've owned my machine, and its report is _nowhere near_ what is being shown in this post. MBA/16GB/1TB, 32.1TB written total.
 
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My MacBook intel 16/256 has 47.5TBW after 2 years and 3-4 months.

My Mac mini m1 16/256 has 2.5 TBW after 2 weeks.

same tasks, programming in xCode, visual studio code, node.js (v15). 8-12 hours daily on.

to all of you saying „This is fine” - Do the Math, Please.
 
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Marx55 said:
What about using DriveDX to check the disks' health?

DriveDx - the most advanced drive health diagnostics and monitoring utility

DriveDx - the most advanced drive health (S.M.A.R.T.) diagnostics and monitoring utility. Save yourself the data loss and downtime that is associated with unexpected SSD and HDD failures. Don't worry about losing your important data, music, and photographs.
binaryfruit.com binaryfruit.com
Click to expand...

DriveDX is just a fancy GUI for the open source smartmontools, so you should get the same results.
 
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ZipZilla said:
This is exactly why I never buy the first version of an Apple product. People wind up being guinea pigs and beta testers. Expensive!
Click to expand...
Heh, this again. Will you buy the second version? What if it's a redesign (since this is using the old Mini Case). You'll need to wait for the version after that. But that one might use the M3's new memory architecture. Sorry, better wait for the one after that one...
 
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Lightly used M1 Mini 16/512 since mid-December.
Maybe this is a problem for the 8gb RAM crowd?

Screen Shot 2021-02-23 at 11.57.13 AM.png
 
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Seems to be ok for me but this is only after 5 days of usage, interesting to see temp at 30 degrees (is that low?).
Machine is a Mac mini 16G/256G running macOS 11.2.1.

Screenshot 2021-02-23 at 17.03.40.png


Edit: coming from a 2015 MacBook Pro 16G/256G this thing is fast, sitting on dual 28" Samsung 4k monitors too.
 
neuropsychguy said:
Assuming a linear trend (1% every 1.5 months), wouldn't this mean you safely get over 12 years of use out of it?
Click to expand...

Alternatively, 1% wear at 73 power on hours means it's 100% worn out after 7300 power on hours or 304 power on days but unknown at what percentage wear leveling becomes unusable or adversely affect user experience.
 
I think I may be one of the "winners". 16 GB M1 Mini. Already 10% used. Interestingly, my home directory is on an external Thunderbolt attached disk. I do use lots of RAM though, or if I don't, some page in Safari uses it for me ;)
 

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Think it's time for us to breakdown what programs/apps are causing all the writes?
Mine:
Brave Browser Helper
kernel_task
launchd
 
Code: 
=== START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
Critical Warning:                   0x00
Temperature:                        38 Celsius
Available Spare:                    100%
Available Spare Threshold:          99%
Percentage Used:                    0%
Data Units Read:                    30,112,747 [15.4 TB]
Data Units Written:                 23,674,136 [12.1 TB]
Host Read Commands:                 256,124,100
Host Write Commands:                152,605,639
Controller Busy Time:               0
Power Cycles:                       219
Power On Hours:                     156
Unsafe Shutdowns:                   20
Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
Error Information Log Entries:      0

MBP M1 8GB/256


And I have found a Bug with Adobe products that's described here, as I'm a photographer I'v been using LR a lot and it has a big memory leak. So I advise everyone to disable their GPU Acceleration and working with smart previews only, with the main HDD of photos disconnected.

 
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NintendoRev said:
Same here, 100% with my 16/256 Mini. Beginning of December for me though.
Click to expand...
i assume this 100% comes from this SMART value:

Available Spare: 100%

this has no "direct" relation to how much data was written on your disk. this is the space put away to be used once a cell wears out. in this sense, the more data you write on you SSD the more likely you'll see spare space to be used. but this heavily depends on how advanced wear levelling is built into the SSD controller.
 
ViktorEvil said:
I don't know why I have a huge amount of power cycles? its not like I rebooted 40 times a day, I just normally close the lid,

maybe the tool is reading some of the data incorrectly?
Click to expand...

I had issues with device spontaneously rebooting during sleep around Big Sur 11.0.1 so I suspect that's where power cycles and unsafe shutdowns were coming from.
 
thadoggfather said:
If SSD’s burn out with 2 years of casual use Apple is going to have to extend a program

I’m not going to look at stats just see how this shakes out
-base m1 air
Click to expand...
Or how about: “If SSDs burn out within 2 years of casual use, I won’t be buying another Apple product unless they make them user replaceable”.
 
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