Apple Event: May 7th at 7 am PT
“How to check your M1 Macbooks SSD health using Terminal” is an article on MacWorld about the SSDs in response to a perception that the drives are working overtime. The concern is if the cause is the OS or is it hardware. As the SSD is not replaceable this is a concern.
MY CONCERN is that I just ordered a new M1 MacBook with 8 gb ram and 1TB SSD. Should I cancel the order and wait for bugs to be “worked out”?
Thanks for you opinions
Halliday wrote:
In the case of Solid State Drives (SSDs), it is writes that wear them out. In fact, for the primary failure mode, one can still read an SSD even after writes have failed.
FYI, in theory a worn out SSD is supposed to go into read-only mode, but in practice this just doesn't seem to work out that way. Years ago a website did a couple year long stress test on SSDs and I don't believe any of those SSDs went into read-only mode when they become worn out. In fact I just had an Apple SSD on a USB-C Mac where the SSD did go into read-only mode. I was able to mount the SSD one time, but when I tried to mount the SSD later I was unable to mount it. It seems the SSD had somehow gotten into a weird state.
Halliday wrote:
In the case of Solid State Drives (SSDs), it is writes that wear them out. In fact, for the primary failure mode, one can still read an SSD even after writes have failed.
FYI, in theory a worn out SSD is supposed to go into read-only mode, but in practice this just doesn't seem to work out that way. Years ago a website did a couple year long stress test on SSDs and I don't believe any of those SSDs went into read-only mode when they become worn out. In fact I just had an Apple SSD on a USB-C Mac where the SSD did go into read-only mode. I was able to mount the SSD one time, but when I tried to mount the SSD later I was unable to mount it. It seems the SSD had somehow gotten into a weird state.
Welcome, Rmgerbino, to Apple Support Communities!
Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) also wear out.
In the case of Solid State Drives (SSDs), it is writes that wear them out. In fact, for the primary failure mode, one can still read an SSD even after writes have failed.
In terms of lifetime, for SSDs, it is approximately proportional to the size of the SSD divided by the number of bytes written per time.
For most people, the number of bytes written per year, say, is not too terribly large, so the smaller SSDs, sold in Macs, these days, will likely last the five to ten years of life of their Macs.
For heavy users, a larger SSD is probably called for anyway, but that will cause the heavily used SSD to last about as long.
If you’re still worried, check out the video: Apple M1 SSD Lifespan - Should we worry about the SWAPPING?
With a 1 TB SSD, your MacBook Air will likely be obsolete before
there would be any concern of the SSD failing.
There has been this "concern" about M1s doing excessive writes,
but that is an OS issue. The hardware does not magic;;y decide
to write to the drive. Therefore, FWIW, there should be the
same concern of any other Mac laptop or MacMini introduced
since 2018 as SSDs are not replaceable on them either other
than replacing the logic board.
You shouldn’t hold back. All adds wear out with time and usage. It may also not be accurate. Just get it and enjoy it😁.
MacBook air M1 SSD over working?
