To make my OCD self unhappy, I started digging into the SSD health of my 256gb SSD drive on my M4 base Mini. Why the heck has the computer read/written so much data, and how have I already used 3% of the life? I store most of the data on external drives, though I do usually have a decent size (4-10gb) swap going because 1) I can't notice a difference 2) the price for upgrades is insane as we know.
Smartctl shows:
Temperature: 37 Celsius
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 3%
Data Units Read: 228,895,951 [117 TB]
Data Units Written: 45,655,893 [23.3 TB]
Host Read Commands: 967,024,502
Host Write Commands: 487,984,668
Controller Busy Time: 0
Power Cycles: 135
Power On Hours: 188
Another thread said that there might be a bug in smartctl.
It's more likely that the drive is reporting some of the numbers to smartctl in a non-standard way than a bug in smartctl. On my MacBook Air 2020 (Intel), it says Power On Hours is ~ 500 but I'd be surprised if the true number of power on hours is < 5000 over the 4 years.
In the case of Data Units Written, I doubt it's wrong (at least I doubt it is overcounting) but it seems high but for a computer that can't be more than a few months old. That laptop which I use everyday is only at 31 TB. That you say you always have a lot of swap going tells me that we're using our systems differently. I am mainly using productivity apps on this machine and do try to avoid swap, which for my purpose is mainly caused by browsers going crazy (plus some Apple software...all most likely caused by memory leaks and lazy programming).
As such, I try to avoid running apps that actually need more than my system's RAM (maximum of 12 out of 16 GB available for user software on this system) and then restart apps like browsers when they start to get uppidty. It's annoying but it seems where we are with a lot of software these days.
If you actually need more than the (I am guesing) 16GB RAM that came with your system, you should look at trading it in for a more appropriately sized machine. I disagree with those who say it doesn't matter and fine to run with continuous swap as long as Memory Pressure is not in the Red but that's a debate for another thread.
What I would do next is start a clean session, start my core/primary apps (the ones I purchased the system for) in a configuration that I would normally use to be productive, and then check Memory Used, Compressed Used, and Swap Used in Activity Monitor. If this is your clean starting point, there shouldn't be any Compressed or Swap -- those are good in a pinch or loading a random extra app here and there. Then add ~ 2 GB for minimum Cached and a little breathing room and that's the minimum RAM I would want for now (plus if buying a new computer, add some to grow on).
Then agree with Fishrrrman as far as getting 'More than you actually "need"' and hope the above helps in determining what that actually is.
As far as turning off VM disk swapping, that will force living within what you have. But if you do have what you need, having it on or off should work out about the same. Having it off might result in applications being killed before you can save/close but by definition it won't swap. Having it on means you have to manually monitor and intervene like I mention above (which is kind of ironic...).
P.S.With Apple's full Unified Memory starting with Mx systems, you may have to modify the above to consider RAM needs as application + GPU (VRAM) needs. My current suite of applications don't have high VRAM needs so I ignore for now but of course other people's needs are the exact opposite.
