M1 SSD high read and write usage per smartctl

Same for me 4 months old SSD, now 44 TB of SSD writes, 50 TB of reads. I do not even transfer large files or use time machine, this is crazy... My Macbook Air 2013 catalina os has written a lot less...

I might be lucky I guess.

System reports a time since boot of 48 days and kernel_task has only written 44,06GB for me inside activity monitor. Weirdly enough in the bottom it says written data 196GB and 404GB read. Swap usage is 716MB with 6GB RAM being used according to the memory tab while I have nothing open in the background.

I don't do heavy tasks on my macbook, atleast not regularly so I believe the 44GB written is much better than what I see in the couple hundred GBs or even TBs of writes. And that's for 48 days of use.

Just on additional item of note is to make sure you deduct

any writes to external devices such as Time Machine, which

depending on how much data you have internal can be sizable.

I probably would if I had the time, but people keep asking when they will get their laptops back. ;-)

My M1 MBP 8/256 has used 21% of SSD life in 5 months writing 258TB !! to disk.

My Kernel Tasks regularly go crazy running up to 5000% CPU

Drive DX, Tinker Tool System and TechTool Pro all show 22% of Disk life used since December 20 and 260TB written to disk.

Thanks @nilp it is clearly Kernel Tasks by a mile, over 600GB written since yesterday.

Been having problems for months with runaway Kernel Tasks eating CPU and now clearly eating SSD life

Thanks, checked kexts and all Apple

Dumping BitDefender made little difference

6.6TB a month = 792TB annually which is the total life of some SSDs

Sorry, my maths mistake. Tried to do it in my head )-:

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09iO4TuVkCA

All those people saying its not an issue take note: The M1 is demonstrably writing 10-60x more to the SSD than an intel mac doing the same thing with the same apps and the same memory, including M1 native apps from Apple.

In my case, at the current write rate, the SSD will fail in under 2 years, but outside the warranty, and irreparably.

Apple are silent - they dont want to admit liability, but whats not clear to me is what, from a technical point of view, could possibly be causing this? Is it a major flaw in the apple silicon architecture, or a bug in the OS? If it were a bug in the OS, presumably Apple would have addressed it already.

This is an opportunity for a 3rd party to analyse the problem and produce some sort of fix. Either HW - e.g. a TB connected SSD to take the fall, or SW (e.g. limiting the number of apps in memory to a low number).

I am lucky, I kept my old 15" 2017 intel MBPro when I bought the M1, so I can switch back to it when the SSD's time comes. I should switch back now - being able to use 2 monitors again would increase my productivity significantly, but I do like the battery life and small size of the M1. Tough.

sfromgi wrote:

Watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09iO4TuVkCA

Interesting video. Thanks. Here is another video by the same person that includes some brief information about how SSDs work as well as trying to identify the maker of the SSD itself and the SSD's possible endurance and what it may mean for the M1's SSD and how to minimize the SSD's wear (hopefully until Apple fixes the issue if possible). The interesting part for me begins at 4:12 with attempting to determine the manufacturer of the SSD.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e8aCgnb_RQs

Apple are silent - they dont want to admit liability, but whats not clear to me is what, from a technical point of view, could possibly be causing this? Is it a major flaw in the apple silicon architecture, or a bug in the OS? If it were a bug in the OS, presumably Apple would have addressed it already.

Apple is always silent as they love their secrets. Apple is unlikely to admit to the issue unless they can actually fix the issue, otherwise it opens them up to lawsuits. You may have to actually wait until a lot of people have their M1 Macs' SSDs fail prematurely so that Apple is unable to hide the premature failures. According to the video I linked it is likely to happen to high use professionals in a about a year of use. The video mentioned at least one M1 Mac has already died due to a worn out SSD although he did not mention where this news was reported.

I am lucky, I kept my old 15" 2017 intel MBPro when I bought the M1, so I can switch back to it when the SSD's time comes. I should switch back now - being able to use 2 monitors again would increase my productivity significantly, but I do like the battery life and small size of the M1. Tough.

Definitely keep the old laptop especially if your workload is with lots of data usage.