ssd swap - high usage of Terabytes Written

[toke lahti]

This is very out of topic (maybe?), but if you need a mac without "internal" screen, the prices are mini:$600, air:$1000 and mbp: $1600.
So the screen you won't use will cost $400 or $1000.
One more thing: you can upgrade 3rd party ssd, so with apple's price for 256GB upgrade, you get 6 times of that space.

 

[gank41]

Yesterday was my M1 MBP's 5 year birthday. CoconutBattery shows the manufacture date as being Nov 16, 2020 and here's the stats.. Going strong.

 

[MultiFinder17]

My M1 Mac mini, manufactured December 2020, in daily use in my classroom running my big display since early 2022.

 

[toke lahti]

I'd say those stats are very interesting.
First they show, how different the "OS wear" can be.

606TB from 16thNov2020 ≈ 330 GB of writes PER DAY.

70.6TB from 15thDec2020 ≈ 39 GB of writes PER DAY.

Think about if OS would write those "logs" to write-once CD-R (0.7GB). 330GB would mean 470 shiny discs burned every day...

And where would one get a NAND with TBW of 4700?
Or was that common 5 years ago?

 

[topcat001]

From my tests, the basic OS writes are usually a few GB a day, without disabling spotlight and with no swapping. I disable Apple Intelligence usually. I disabled disk persistence for a couple of logs such as bluetooth and iohid which are the worst offenders.

Browsers are completely pathological when it comes to abusing the disk. I run my browsers (FF and Chrome) off a RAM disk. This virtual device receives many TBs of writes per day. My profiles are synced so RAM disk makes no difference. Safari of course cannot be run this way but it’s not my daily use browser. Mostly used for HDR streaming.

 

[Queen6]

Is this still even a "thing" was always BS stirred up by those that have no clue how the OS & HW interact. Have kept my base M1 model 13" MBP unsurprisingly it's good as new 🤔 Actually a little better thx to Apple's optimisation of the OS.

Those stating Mx Mac's would burn out their SSD were either paid to do so, sadly misinformed or just talking out their arse. I wait to be proved wrong...

Q-6

 

[toke lahti]

Is this still even a "thing" was always BS stirred up by those that have no clue how the OS & HW interact. Have kept my base M1 model 13" MBP unsurprisingly it's good as new 🤔 Actually a little better thx to Apple's optimisation of the OS.

Those stating Mx Mac's would burn out their SSD were either paid to do so, sadly misinformed or just talking out their arse. I wait to be proved wrong...

Q-6

You can believe or not believe whatever.
But there is nothing stupid to think that an OS that writes tens or hundreds of GIGABYTES PER DAY, could be a problem.

That is just a thing you can't no before it happens.

If you guess right, you can feel proud of yourself?

 

[Queen6]

You can believe or not believe whatever.
But there is nothing stupid to think that an OS that writes tens or hundreds of GIGABYTES PER DAY, could be a problem.

That is just a thing you can't no before it happens.

If you guess right, you can feel proud of yourself?

Still waiting for my M1 MBP to die due to SSD failure, equally will be a very long wait. Don't like how Apple engineers Mac's no one is forcing you to purchase one... I don't care how many GB the OS writes per day, I only care that the system performs, runtime off mains is class leading and has good longevity, so far so good, this is apparently the same for the vast majority...

Apple has always been under the spotlight, and has brought much on itself; poor thermal management, butterfly KB etc. Apple simply failed to do due diligence. If Mx Mac's are problematic they would have been exposed by now. If anything, the M1 Mac's will be the most reliable, long-lasting Mac's ever produced as Apple had to take a risk and needed zero blowback...

Q-6

 

[osplo]

Mine (MacBook Air M1) is as good as new after all these years. Percentage used: 2%. Good for the next hundred years.

 

[stigman]

Guys,





What could have used up a few terabytes? The machine has been powered on for 29 days. Brave browser is open with many tabs pinned down.





I'm running macOS Sequoia 15.7.4.

 

[ChrisA]

What could have used up a few terabytes? The machine has been powered on for 29 days. Brave browser is open with many tabs pinned down.

It seems that macOS has moved a lot of your data from RAM to SSD so as to allow more productive use of the RAM. Data to keep those tabs pinned is a waste of RAM so it got swapped to SSD. This makes sense now that SSD is fast enough to swap data back in faster than the screen can refresh

Yes, I know it is annoying that the write cycles of the SSD will be used up in only 50 or 70 years, but most of use don't keep our computers that long.

 

[v654321]

Quick update after running my M1 MacBook Pro (8GB/512GB) pretty much daily for 8-12 hours since its launch back in 2020 (bought it on launch day). Typical use is lots of web browsing (always 10-20 tabs open), YouTube/movie watching, lots of productivity work (mainly Office type applications), some scripting/coding and image/video editing.

I have been running my ssd_wear_stats.sh script hourly using the following crontab entry. Given the tiny percentage used (only 4% after 5 years of continuous use) I'm not worried at all about SSD wear:

$ crontab -l
0 * * * * /Path/to/scripts/ssd_wear_mon.sh >> /Path/to/scripts/ssd_wear_stats 2>&1
$ cat /Path/to/scripts/ssd_wear_mon.sh
/usr/local/sbin/smartctl -a /dev/disk1 | grep -E "Time is:|Temperature:|Used:|Read:|Written:" | cut -b 37- | tr '\n' '-' | sed 's/-/ - /g' | rev | cut -b 3- | rev
$ ls -la ~/scripts/ssd_wear_mon.sh
 -rwxr-xr-x  1 xxxxx  staff  175 18 Jul  2021 Path/to/scripts/ssd_wear_mon.sh
$ head -5 ~/scripts/ssd_wear_stats
Sun Jul 18 17:11:33 2021 CEST - 29 Celsius - 0% - 22,277,754 [11.4 TB] - 15,828,871 [8.10 TB]
Sun Jul 18 18:00:01 2021 CEST - 27 Celsius - 0% - 22,281,227 [11.4 TB] - 15,829,503 [8.10 TB]
Sun Jul 18 19:00:00 2021 CEST - 30 Celsius - 0% - 22,282,471 [11.4 TB] - 15,829,916 [8.10 TB]
Sun Jul 18 20:00:00 2021 CEST - 27 Celsius - 0% - 22,283,323 [11.4 TB] - 15,830,484 [8.10 TB]
Sun Jul 18 21:00:00 2021 CEST - 28 Celsius - 0% - 22,284,242 [11.4 TB] - 15,831,056 [8.10 TB]
$ tail -5 ~/scripts/ssd_wear_stats
Sat Mar 21 18:00:01 2026 CET - 31 Celsius - 4% - 655,798,644 [335 TB] - 183,985,286 [94.2 TB]                                                                                                                                 Sat Mar 21 18:00:01 2026 CET - 31 Celsius - 4% - 655,798,644 [335 TB] - 183,985,286 [94.2 TB]
Sat Mar 21 19:00:01 2026 CET - 29 Celsius - 4% - 655,806,280 [335 TB] - 183,987,055 [94.2 TB]
Sat Mar 21 20:00:01 2026 CET - 26 Celsius - 4% - 655,808,997 [335 TB] - 183,987,779 [94.2 TB]
Sat Mar 21 22:00:02 2026 CET - 25 Celsius - 4% - 655,819,356 [335 TB] - 183,993,981 [94.2 TB]
Sat Mar 21 23:00:02 2026 CET - 30 Celsius - 4% - 655,828,608 [335 TB] - 183,995,257 [94.2 TB]

 

[ChrisA]

I have been running my ssd_wear_stats.sh script hourly using the following crontab entry. Given the tiny percentage used (only 4% after 5 years of continuous use) I'm not worried at all about SSD wear:

This is my point too. The Mac's SSD should last something like 80 to 100 years. But it is hard to know because the script you use is just guessing about the SSD's write lifetime spec.

 

[trip1ex]

Mac mini m1 base model has not, I repeat, has not exploded. This has been a public service announcement.

 

[Queen6]

Was obviously always nonsense. Apple switching to its own silicon was a big deal, could you imagine the fallout after all the keyboard & throttling issues if the M1's SSD's failed in just a couple years. You can guarantee the instruction from the very top of the company was to ensure zero issues with the M1 release or else...

Q-6

 

[MultiFinder17]

I recently adopted a friend's base M1 MacBook Pro that he's used for the last five years or so. He uses his computer far more heavily than it's meant to bear, and keeps 30+ Chrome tabs open, constantly switching between them, along with Word, Excel, Mail, numerous productivity apps. He also has a habit of never rebooting his machine. Every time I've used it it's generally running with 8-12GB of swap, and has been doing so pretty much constantly for the last five years. He just got a new M5 Air, and I encouraged him to get one with more RAM while I got his M1 to give a quiet retirement to.

Here's the result.


1.1 PETABYTES written to the drive, 1.5 read. I benchmarked it and it's still as fast as it was new, and the machine runs fantastically. I think it's safe to say that these drives are hardy 😛