M1 SSD high read and write usage per smartctl

M1 SSD wear is looking like a serious problem. My very clean M1 MBP 8/256 using fairly standard business apps has used 21% of SSD life in 5 months writing 258TB !! to disk. This means the SSD will die at just under 2 years which is unacceptable. 

Also lots of runaway kernel tasks using over 5000% CPU! Safari appears to cause a lot of this

How do I get this addressed?

Apple is going to have huge warranty problems around the two-year mark

Do you have a antivirus, cleaner, optimizing, etc. apps

installed?

Also, are all apps up to date as well as any hardware drivers?

What sort of apps are in your startup items (both user and system)?

What web browser are you using and what sort of plugins

are being used?

Any or all of the above can cause runaway CPU use.

Also, no one really knows what the TBW lifetime is for the

Apple SSDs. Also, like anything else, once you hit TBW limit,

it may start to show issues or could last for lots and lots of TBs

longer.

The other fact about TBW ratings for any SSD, is they are just

a hedge for manufacturer warranty coverage. Much like the milage

and warranty for a car. If the warranty is for 50,000 miles it just

doesn't shut down at 50,001 and cease to work.

Just checked and Kernel Tasks IS the culprit, 637GB written since the last reboot yesterday

Three different utilities all give 22% of disk life used since December 20

Tried Apple support who were not much help on this issue

Anyone know how to escalate with Apple this and get it taken seriously?

In terms of kernel task using up so much writes, the kernel task

is doing all the "low level" work that is required by all apps that

make any system requests and all other tasks to keep the

computer working.

So, it is quite possible you have an app that is generating runaway

requests of the kernel that itself does not show up directly as

the apps disk use, such as apps disk cache or scratch disk use.

Also, look at the data you collected from those apps and do the math

and you will see that they reports must be questionable. If

your drive has in fact done 260TBW and a lifetime is generally

300 TBW (Apple states no spec on that) it would mean you have 87%

of life used not 22% and if you take the 22% used and the writes

reported, that would mean the drive has a life span of nearly

1200TBW which isn't even matched by high quality enterprise

SSDs which are in the 700-800 TBW range!

So, what is reported is severely suspect by all apps!

Has anyone here seeing excessive writes raised a support ticket with Apple?

If enough people do this instead of just railing about perhaps Apple will

investigate the situation.

I for one have not been seeing this issue, at least not enough for concern.

And I know I push my machine often to the point of memory swapping.

My usage has been an average of ~27GB/day since the end of last

November to date. Based on that, I have an SSD life expectancy of

somewhere around 19 years if one is assuming a 200TBW life time which

is likely lowballing it for a 512 GB drive (more likely 300-400). That is

also assuming that the SSD chips Apple is using are consumer level chips.

So, there are possibilities that there is a user element in the phenomenon

in terms of how the machine is physically used by the individuals with

the issue as well as what they have installed on their systems. These

days, who knows how apps are written and what things they do

"behind the scenes". And certain combinations could be leading

to "runaway" scenarios.

Since I've upgraded to 11.4 it feels like the issue disappeared. The swap stays low and on the other hand memory pressure is a lot higher than it used to be before. But now it's correct imo. And even overall performance seems to be better to me. After 8 days of working average 8 hours a day kernel task has written only 150 GB, which is pretty nice. I have 16 GB but running some java apps, php, docker and IntelliJ (not mentioning thousands tabs in safari, and other apps like discord chrome etc) so I use constantly all of my available memory and still got only 150 GB. So at least I would say that it's finally fixed.

To me, it appears the culprit is the screen saver leaking memory, causing the swap usage to go unnecessarily high. Can someone please try to confirm if you are seeing the same thing?

My smartctl report on my MBP M1 states 58.TB written (328,696,111 write commands). I have only had it since the 9th of January (Power on hours @ 239) so I'm particularly concerned about this potential issue.

If you have enough of a hardware fleet around, might want to deploy some tools to dump the smart data across the fleet. Much like figuring out which part of ACPI a vendor is using, figuring out where to look for the over-provisioning and error data that matters is ha;f the “fun”.

My MBpro M1 16/1tb is showing 6.6TB written in less than 1 month of lite use. My windows laptop has been thrashed for 3 years,(serveral VMs, 2 permanently running DBs, thousands of app builds etc) and only has 3TB written. looking at activity monitor, the one which is always 100x more writes than any other process is kernal task (currently at 100GB for no apparent reason since reboot this morning).

Robert, can you check Real Memory usage when you see kernel_task using a lot of CPU? Is there anything that stands out, eg Rosetta 2 apps being the main offenders?

I’m afraid, unfortunately, that 8GB RAM isn’t enough for you. I’m pretty sure it’s swapping to disk.

Opening Safari with 1 tab spikes Kernel Tasks from 0% to over 5000% and 1 tab uses 1.03GB of memory

Only other app showing any major memory use in BitDefender

Just uninstalling BD to see what happens

FYI other people with 16GB RAM are reporting exactly the same problem - See @sfromgi in this thread "My MBpro M1 16/1tb is showing 6.6TB written in less than 1 month of lite use" That's even worse than me

Robert Follis wrote:

Opening Safari with 1 tab spikes Kernel Tasks from 0% to over 5000% and 1 tab uses 1.03GB of memory

Only other app showing any major memory use in BitDefender

Just uninstalling BD to see what happens

Erk - ok.

I don't have an M1 Mac so I don't know if this is relevant, but kernel extensions have caused issues with MacOS in the past. Open a Terminal window and type kextstat. Look for anything that's not "com.apple ..."

But this is just throwing stuff out there. Another thing that may be just something to occupy a few minutes is to reset the SMC - https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201295

YI other people with 16GB RAM are reporting exactly the same problem - See @sfromgi in this thread "My MBpro M1 16/1tb is showing 6.6TB written in less than 1 month of lite use" That's even worse than me

6.6TB in a month isn't so bad. My own averages out at 5TB/month.

I've enabled "Prevent computer from sleeping automatically when the display is off" so the M1 Mac mini should never go into sleep. What's really odd is, Swap Used reported by Activity Monitor was 0 bytes prior to display automatically turned off after set period. After waking up the display, Swap Used has increased to 526MB.

As a result, KernelTask has written large amount of data during the time while the display is off. Every time the display is automatically turned off, the Swap Used is increased! By the end of the day, Swap Used is a few GB, and KernelTask has written close to 200GB of data (per day) and that seems excessive.

I am on macOS 11.3 and the M1 Mac mini is 8/256GB model. Something is odd during the sleep time, perhaps some background process is leaking memory causing excessive swap usage.

--

I've tested further to discover this:

1. Turn screen saver on after 1 minute
2. Turn off sleep in power mode
3. Swap Used is 0 bytes after a clean reboot
4. Let the screen saver starts after 1 minute
5. Wait for another minute

Now Swap Used is 636MB.