Extreme SSD Writes M1 Mac Air 8/256GB

FWIW, any computer with only 8 GB of RAM is woefully inadequate

for the memory pigs such as Lightroom CC or Classic. Those apps

should only be run a machine with 16 GB as a bare minimum. This

comes from years of experience using those apps (particularly

Lightroom Classic). With only 8 GB of RAM those apps will

trigger constant memory swaps. The speed of the new M1s

and there extremely fast tight coupled SSD will tend to hide

this fact unlike the drives of old which would slow processing

to a snails pace.

SeanGoldd wrote:

...Also Adobe says 8GB minimum Lightroom.

Very, very barely.

Also, Lightroom Classic image databases are extremely

disk intensive and it is not just the visible files you see in

your project directories, a ton is written to cache a in

the directories in the hidden ~/Library folder.

Also, if you read on further in these articles, the majority of

them also point out it is not just an M1 Mac thing but users

of Intel MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros are seeing similar issues

as well.

In addition, if you are using the current version of Smart Tools

to get this info, I would take it with a grain of salt at this time

as I see several bad info on the reports that are out right wrong

and it may not be properly reporting the devices used in the M1 Macs

(SSD reporting issue or Big Sur issue?)

When I heard about this "issue" I was monitoring daily usage and

there was a two day period where Activity Monitor said I had

40 GB of disk writes but the "tool" actually said the TBW went down

by 10 GB. Also, It has stated the SSD was "on" for only 89 hours.

I have had my M1 MBA since the end of November and average

use was likely 7 hours per day or ~630 hours!

My own experience with the same Mac Air version hasn’t been the same, though admittedly when I’m suing Lightroom Classic + Photoshop (both running at the same time) I rarely have anything else running. I have noted that having graphics acceleration turned on in LRC, that swap is used more extensively and not very much at all with it turned off. But in both cases, always more when exporting to JPEG or similar. Also, I haven’t seen any speed slowdowns since turning graphics acceleration off. So, recommend experimenting with that. I’m thinking once LRC is released for M1, all will be fine and the current memory requirements won’t be an issue as those were meant for Intel versions.

Swap is a dynamically changing thing and what you should be looking at

is disk writes which do not always correlate with swap. Also, with the speed of

the close coupled SSDs and RAM and the higher efficiency of file control

of the M1, when swaps and disk writes are occurring it is not really noticeable.

While I do not use the Adobe Cash Cow apps, I have seen the phenomenon

of 3 or 4 GB of swap used, but have 30-40 GB of disk writes.

Also, I believe there may be some issue with apps running under Rosetta

that request blocks of RAM, but those blocks not being returned to the

system and thus triggering disk swaps and writes as the app RAM usage

tends to keep going. Example, I did 2 identical photo processing sessions

an the primary app grew to nearly 10 GB on the M1 but on my Intel

iMac the same app never grew above 2.8 GB.

Just to add, it also said it was power cycled 447 times!?!?

And note that I do not allow drives to sleep. Out of the

past 90 days or so, I have only "power cycled" my MBA

150 times at most.

The tool was actually S.M.A.R.T. Monitoring Tools