The lifespan of MacBook SSDs

[Kyudoka]

According to DriveDX my SSD has 130 TB written, and a health (lifetime left indicator) of 91% (9% used). However I've read that 256 GB SSDs have a TBW of 150 TB (at least that's the official number from Samsung), so shouldn't the health be much lower, over 80% used? Is DriveDX accurate? Or are the SSDs used actually that good? I try to conserve Ram, but still end up using roughly 50GB daily, probably due to swapping (I have the 8 GB model).

Someone in the forum made a long-term test and came to the conclusion that the actual lifespan is in the PB range (https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...d.2417822/page-12?post=33863049#post-33863049), I find these number almost too good to be true though.

Has anyone a similar experience? Has anyones Mac SSD failed? Would love to hear your experiences! Thanks!

 

[Boppi]

I wouldn't worry about it. Use it as intended and it'll last for years. If it were to fail prematurely, there are resources for replacement.

 

[BigMcGuire]

According to DriveDX my SSD has 130 TB written, and a health (lifetime left indicator) of 91% (9% used). However I've read that 256 GB SSDs have a TBW of 150 TB (at least that's the official number from Samsung), so shouldn't the health be much lower, over 80% used? Is DriveDX accurate? Or are the SSDs used actually that good? I try to conserve Ram, but still end up using roughly 50GB daily, probably due to swapping (I have the 8 GB model).

Someone in the forum made a long-term test and came to the conclusion that the actual lifespan is in the PB range (https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...d.2417822/page-12?post=33863049#post-33863049), I find these number almost too good to be true though.

Has anyone a similar experience? Has anyones Mac SSD failed? Would love to hear your experiences! Thanks!

I second @Boppi - I wouldn't worry about it. Even when the Apple Silicon models first came out and were known to chug SSD writes like crazy, they didn't die.

I have a 4TB SSD on my M1 MBP and I have 151.1TB writes and 98% health according to DriveDX.

To address your post - I think most consumer grade cheap SSDs would expect a 150-300 TBW for a 256 GB SSD. Based on tests done (I can't remember the links) - realistically, especially the name brand ones (Samsung Pro), can see 1000+ TBW. For Apple SSDs I would expect 1000-1500 TBW for a 256GB - which DriveDX's health indicator (based off of Apple reported system values) seems to indicate.

So using math (which I suck at) - you have 1444 TBW estimated lifespan based on that health value.
My Mac has 7500 TBW based on my health value. (4TB vs 256GB)

 

[bzgnyc2]

According to DriveDX my SSD has 130 TB written, and a health (lifetime left indicator) of 91% (9% used). However I've read that 256 GB SSDs have a TBW of 150 TB (at least that's the official number from Samsung), so shouldn't the health be much lower, over 80% used? Is DriveDX accurate? Or are the SSDs used actually that good? I try to conserve Ram, but still end up using roughly 50GB daily, probably due to swapping (I have the 8 GB model).

Someone in the forum made a long-term test and came to the conclusion that the actual lifespan is in the PB range (https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...d.2417822/page-12?post=33863049#post-33863049), I find these number almost too good to be true though.

Has anyone a similar experience? Has anyones Mac SSD failed? Would love to hear your experiences! Thanks!

Have not had the SSD fail in any of my Macs. The numbers from DriveDx are simply the numbers the drive self-reports via SMART and as reliable as any vendor-provided data of this type. I don't believe unreasonable but I also wouldn't bet my life on them.

Note that a TBW rating is for a specific SSD and not the NAND chips itself. Even if a Mac and a Samsung shared the exact same NAMD chip, they could have different TBW rating based on both the vendor assumptions of usage patterns and the allocation algorithms. Even if your Mac uses Samsung's NAND chips, all Macs since at least the T2 (and someone else can chime in on T1 and earlier) use their own storage controller (builtin into Apple Silicon/T2 on the late model Macs) with their own algorithms.

As an explanation of how the drive life could differ based on the same NAND, most SSD storage these days is built on TLC with a pSLC mode. Each cell of a TLC is typically rated at 3000 writes when used in that mode but 100K writes in pSLC mode. pSLC mode requires 3x the cells of TCL mode (e.g. allocated all as pSLC, your drive capacity is cut by 2/3rds). Then algorithms (modern SSD are basically self-contained computers that would have qualified as a supercomputer back in the 80s/90s) try to optimize how much space is allocated in pSLC and how much TLC and which file blocks are stored in which mode. Plus add various overprovisioning and sophisticated error correction and projecting total and remaining drive life expectancy gets complex.

So most higher quality TLC-based consumer NVMe SSD have TBW rating ~ 600-1200x capacity (e.g. 1200 - 2400 TBW for a 2TB SSD). This is the rated life expectancy and if the drive fails before both the age and TBW rating are hit, the vendor will replace it. And more like the manufacturer's warranty on a car than the fuel gauge, the car won't blow up or even shortly after hitting its rating but on average expect more problems. And when it comes to storage, my goal is 0 problems so hitting the TBW rating would mean relegating the SSD either to purely scratch or experimental usage (i.e. tests like the guy did in the link you showed).

In the case of the internal SSD of a Mac where Apple doesn't provide a TBW rating/warranty specifically, I would go with the lifetime left indicator that Apple made available for software like DriveDx to report. If it says you are 9% used, feel comfortable that you can do what you've been doing for 10x as long as you've been doing it before the SSD dies (which will unfortunately render any T2 or Apple Silicon-based Mac dead). If this is a recent MacBook Air M5, that's probably not great though still on the order of years. If this was a MacBook Air 2020, that SSD will outlive the rest of the Mac and possibly you.

 

[1rottenapple]

And you always hear people on here talking about how bad swap is. Yet failure rates are unheard of. Maybe in 20 yrs they’ll fail but frankly how many even hold on to laptops for 20yrs.

 

[Harddrive]

I think most will go obsolete before failure.

 

[1rottenapple]

I think most will go obsolete before failure.

Yah but god forbid you get a base model and people here on swap swap swap memory. Swap memory. Blah blah. Please. lol ya sure those ssd fail when they’re on some landfill. I remember those comments when the m1 came out and I got a the base model and those comment still persist here and there. Even when the Neo came out someone will say swap memory lol.

 

[Apathist]

Has anyones Mac SSD failed? Would love to hear your experiences! Thanks!

It can obviously happen, but offhand I can't recall anyone ever posting here on MacRumors or anywhere else that they had actually exceeded the write endurance of their MacBook SSD through anything like normal use. Anecdotally it would just seem to be extremely uncommon, even among heavy users like those who frequent this site.

My sense is that the DriveDx “lifetime left” reports are based on the drive manufacturer’s estimated floor, or warranted minimum write capacity, not the ceiling that it’s likely to achieve, which as your research suggests could potentially be extraordinarily high.

As @Boppi and others have advised, it's probably not worth worrying about.

 

[Kyudoka]

Yah but god forbid you get a base model and people here on swap swap swap memory. Swap memory. Blah blah. Please. lol ya sure those ssd fail when they’re on some landfill. I remember those comments when the m1 came out and I got a the base model and those comment still persist here and there. Even when the Neo came out someone will say swap memory lol.

It is still concerning that even when you're moderately online and haven't that many apps open you still end up with 50GB of daily writes because of swapping. It wouldn't be a technical impossibility at all for Apple to make the SSD easily replaceable, but that's another topic.

 

[Kyudoka]

My sense is that the DriveDx “lifetime left” reports are based on the drive manufacturer’s estimated floor

Samsung for example states a TBW of 150 for their 256 SSDs, that's why I was doubting the DriveDX estimate. It sounds too good to be true.

 

[Mike Boreham]

The original monster thread on this topic is too big to be useful now but it includes many factual nuggets... such as:

1. The percentage usage reported by third party tools Drive DX and SmartMontools, has also been discovered deep the Apple own diagnostic data available from Console. See this post and the ones before and after it.

2. There are data points reported by extremely high usage machines which support that Apple SSD life really isn't in the too-good-to-be-true category, and that this really isn't an issue. The high usage one I saw there was 1.15 petabytes TBW, that's 1,150 TB and only 36% SSD life used. (link).

Because I was concerned originally I followed that thread for a long time and monitored my own machines, but have long since relaxed about it.

 

[Bazza1]

2017 (built in 2018) MacBook Air here. Was my primary Mac up until a purchase of M2 Mini in 2023, but still used regularly as my work, travel and cafe visit computer. On Monterey - and even so, it runs 95% of the apps on the M2, including video, photo and audio editing. Without getting into the reporting app nitty-gritty as posted above, I've had no issues (or even suspect issues) with the SSD in it. So let's call it 8 years of work so far.

 

[edddeduck]

It is still concerning that even when you're moderately online and haven't that many apps open you still end up with 50GB of daily writes because of swapping. It wouldn't be a technical impossibility at all for Apple to make the SSD easily replaceable, but that's another topic.

We have a pile of Apple silicon at work for development & testing and they get hit hard with loads of R/W with millions of tiny files, 100GB of active swap not being uncommon and we haven't had a simple failure (or even warning) about the SSD storage.

Specifically we have a pile of launch day M1 devices running just fine after living hard lives with millions of tiny files, loads of swap and generally installing and deleting 60GB applications daily without issue.

tldr; like others have said this is more a theoretical issue than a real work issue in almost all use cases outside of a testing lab designed to make an SSD fail.

 

[ignatius345]

It is still concerning that even when you're moderately online and haven't that many apps open you still end up with 50GB of daily writes because of swapping. It wouldn't be a technical impossibility at all for Apple to make the SSD easily replaceable, but that's another topic.

It sounds like you're looking for a problem that isn't there. You don't need to do all this micromanaging of "conserving RAM" or anything else. Just use the Mac as you need and unless something is actually slowing down you don't need to open Activity Monitor to worry about your swap usage (which is a normal function) or start poking around with DriveDx and speculating about how many years of SSD life you have left.

It's not like you're on a desert island and need to pass this computer on to subsequent generations. By the time it dies, it'll likely be years down the road and you'll probably already have updated it to something newer.

 

[thebellnd]

I've had an SSD fail in an iMac. Apple replaced it under warranty, but that repair was the start of a very dark journey of other problems before the machine completely gave up the ghost. Lord knows what damage was done in the repair center. I haven't bought an iMac since that experience went sour.

 

[BigMcGuire]

I've had an SSD fail in an iMac. Apple replaced it under warranty, but that repair was the start of a very dark journey of other problems before the machine completely gave up the ghost. Lord knows what damage was done in the repair center. I haven't bought an iMac since that experience went sour.

Apple didn’t make it right ?

 

[thebellnd]

Apple didn’t make it right ?

They refused to accept any responsibility for post-repair problems. They did inspect the machine one time soon afterwards, claimed nothing was wrong with the work they did, and then left me with a dying machine. I probably could have fought them using consumer law, but I couldn't be bothered. I needed a machine for various ongoing projects at the time, and my time was far more valuable than cost replacing the iMac. So I just wrote it off, moved on, and saved a fortune in the long-run by not buying new desktop Macs. 😀

 

[ignatius345]

They refused to accept any responsibility for post-repair problems. They did inspect the machine one time soon afterwards, claimed nothing was wrong with the work they did, and then left me with a dying machine. I probably could have fought them using consumer law, but I couldn't be bothered. I needed a machine for various ongoing projects at the time, and my time was far more valuable than cost replacing the iMac. So I just wrote it off, moved on, and saved a fortune in the long-run by not buying new desktop Macs. 😀

This was an SSD that came stock in the iMac?

 

[BigMcGuire]

They refused to accept any responsibility for post-repair problems. They did inspect the machine one time soon afterwards, claimed nothing was wrong with the work they did, and then left me with a dying machine. I probably could have fought them using consumer law, but I couldn't be bothered. I needed a machine for various ongoing projects at the time, and my time was far more valuable than cost replacing the iMac. So I just wrote it off, moved on, and saved a fortune in the long-run by not buying new desktop Macs. 😀

Wow - that’s an exception to normal service that I’ve experienced. We’ve even had them destroy products in repair - and they just gave us a refurbished device and apologize (something that Apple is usually known for).

Sad.

 

[Howard2k]

I've probably had 4-5 HDDs fail in the last 30 years, but no SSDs yet.

Interesting topic but I've looked at my theoretical usage limits and my actual usage over time and it's a total non-issue for me. But I can see for someone who does a ton of massive video edits on a professional basis it might be more of an issue. If that's the case then typically (but not always) an upgrade in storage capacity also comes with an increase in TBW threshold, so problem easily solved.

 

[AlixSPQR]

One or two SSD’s I encountered early on were rubbish, but for the last ten years or so they’ve been fine, and durable.

 

[okkibs]

Apple uses good quality NAND memory chips that will likely outlast more fragile components of a Macbook as well as any software support even if that support were to last for 10 years. But Macbooks still fail and their SSDs do too. Why is that?

It's either because of a hidden manufacturing flaw where the NAND chips are actually faulty or because of a different defect on the logic board that the SSD is soldered onto. And once the logic board goes there's a risk that it might take the NAND chips along with it. It's actually a typical problem where the logic board could be repaired but there wouldn't any SSD detected because the NAND chips were shorted out and destroyed. (The Mac is now dead because the firmware needed for turning on was stored on the SSD.)

Your Mac and its SSD might die way too early but it won't be because of too much swap space usage. If anything the extra write cycles might help a factory-defective SSD to die faster during the warranty period so it can be discovered in time and brought in for a free warranty repair.

That's part of why I don't treat new devices gently and just run my usual workloads. If a fan is too noisy from the factory or some other issue shows up I'll find it early. That's part of why devices are "stress tested" for quality checks by manufacturers like Apple to make sure no hidden issue remains. That stress is merely what the components are meant to handle and doesn't reduce their life expectancy.

tl;dr: You paid for the whole SSD so you might as well use all of it.

 

[Hajj.david]

My several 2014 mac minis that I use as a server, serving millions of records to thousands of requests a day is averaging at around 1-2% a year of usage. Meaning that in roughly 85 years my SSD will theoretically finally die. The whole swap thing is wildly overblown. Sometimes our build server is averaging 10-15 gbs of swap and it also is looking at around 1-2% a year.

Your machine will be uber obsolete or something else will fail in that time span its such a non-issue I dont bother caring about swap anymore.

 

[antnythr]

I wouldn't worry about it. Use it as intended and it'll last for years. If it were to fail prematurely, there are resources for replacement.

Where does Apple publish this "intended use" info you're referencing?

 

[capamac]

Here's my M1 Air 8/256 purchased 2021 and used several hours every day for the past five years:

this data acquired via smartmontools and Homebrew (free!)

See https://www.macworld.com/article/334283/how-to-m1-intel-mac-ssd-health-terminal-smartmontools.html

(Cool red line drawn in Gimp.)