Some M1 Macs Are Showing Excessive SSD Usage

Some people using the latest M1-powered Macs have noticed that the SSD appears to be writing and reading data more than expected, potentially reducing the overall lifespan of the storage.

As reported by various users on Twitter and forums, macOS notes that the internal SSD in M1 Macs has “extremely high drive writes over relatively short time.”

That could, potentially, see the parts fail sooner than expected. One user notes that their machine has already gone through 13% of the total maximum warrantable total bytes written (TBW).

Some more professional users of the new M1 Macbooks are experiencing extremely high drive writes over relatively short time. The most severe cases have “consumed” about 10-13% of the maximum warrantable TBW value of the SSDs (given their capacity & using values for equivalent market-available NVMe drives).

It’s also important to note that the SSD can’t be swapped out of Apple’s latest M1 Macs, potentially leaving people with a problem if they do start to fail.

The reason for the excessive data reads and writes isn’t clear as yet, but some of suggested it’s the relatively small amount of RAM these machines ship with. That could be causing macOS to use the SSD storage as temporary RAM more often than would normally be the case.

(Via: LTT Forums)

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