Macbook Air 2020 Retina, Mac OS Sequoia.
How can I find out the status of my hard drive?
I want to buy a used MacBook. In a few years, the hard drive may deteriorate and then I will have to throw away the MacBook.
In the disk utility, SMART shows Not Supported.
And how can a MacBook user predict that a hard drive might fail? After all, in this case, the data will be lost.
MacBook Airs released in 2020 do not have mechanical hard drives.
They have soldered-in SSDs, whether you are talking about
The Intel-based one has a T2 security chip, and the M1-based one integrates the functions of that chip into the M1. So not only are the flash chips soldered in, but part of the SSD controller is in the T2 chip or the M1 chip. Also, the data on the flash chips is encrypted and decrypted in real time with keys held in the T2 or the M1. If the board dies, you are not going to be pulling that drive and retrieving any data from it.
It's always been important to get into the habit of maintaining backups, but this just underlines it.
MacBook Airs released in 2020 do not have mechanical hard drives.
They have soldered-in SSDs, whether you are talking about
The Intel-based one has a T2 security chip, and the M1-based one integrates the functions of that chip into the M1. So not only are the flash chips soldered in, but part of the SSD controller is in the T2 chip or the M1 chip. Also, the data on the flash chips is encrypted and decrypted in real time with keys held in the T2 or the M1. If the board dies, you are not going to be pulling that drive and retrieving any data from it.
It's always been important to get into the habit of maintaining backups, but this just underlines it.
constantin245 wrote:
Macbook Air 2020 Retina, Mac OS Sequoia.
How can I find out the status of my hard drive?
Where are you getting "SMART" not supported? Every Mac internal drive I recall since the advent of SATA interface drives has supported SMART data access.
Anyway, if you wanted to check the detailed SMART status of the internal SSD (DriveDx is the most user friendly one), there are a few apps available to do that. The important stat is the bytes written as you can only do so many erase/write cycles on a given location on an SSD.
With that stated, unless you are writing hundreds and hundreds of gigabytes of data to the drive on a daily basis, there is really no need to concern yourself.
In all likelihood, your MacBook Air will become obsolete in terms of usability before the SSD "wears out".
FYI, if you are talking about the internal SSD of a Mac, then most you should know that the most common form of SSD failure is due to the SSD's controller failing & no longer being able to communicate with the computer or the SSD's NAND chips. There are no SMART health monitoring of the SSD's controller so there is no way to know anything about the health of the SSD's controller.
About the only warning a user may get is when the SSD suddenly disappears from the bus which generally tends to happen when waking the SSD or first powering on the SSD. The other common failure with SSDs is overheating, but this generally happens more with the third party NVMe SSDs than it does with the Apple built-in SSD's....again no warning.
Most SSDs I have seen will end up writing PBs of data to the SSD before failing due to worn out NAND chips even though many SSDs are only rated for about 300TB of lifetime writes (depends on the SSD and its size....Apple has never published this information). The average user doesn't need to worry about this type of failure because they never even come close to writing that much data to an SSD.
As for monitoring the health of an SSD using a third party utility like DriveDx.....a "Warning" or "Failing" status does not necessarily mean an SSD is done......a Hard Drive on the other hand should be replaced. Unfortunately an SSD's health report generally needs to be manually interpreted by someone who is understands SSDs and has some experience doing so. However, many of the NVMe PCIe based SSDs including the Apple SSDs generally don't have a lot of health information these days making any health assessment very difficult even for someone with lots of experience.
If you meant checking the health of an external drive, then a special USB driver must be installed in order to attempt to check the health of any USB drive (HD or SSD). Some adapters, docks, and enclosures may not allow access to the actual HD's or SSD's health information even with the special USB driver. DriveDx does provide this special USB driver to check external USB drives.....and also provides a download for that USB driver separately. The driver has been signed by DriveDx so the macOS Gatekeeper will accept it easily.
In a few years, the hard drive may deteriorate and then I will have to throw away the MacBook.
How many is "a few"?
All flash memory is write / erase cycle limited. Apple does not publish that specification, so it is unknown, but failures resulting from reaching that limit are — literally — unheard of. As in zero.
Premature failures prior to reaching that limit are — extremely — rare.
Exactly none of my Macs purchased in the past decade and a half use hard disk drives. They all use SSDs or built-in storage. Zero failures. The oldest ones are functionally obsolete by now, so it wasn't hardware failure that did them in. It's the passage of time and advances in technology that makes Macs obsolete. The same can be said of nearly anything more complicated than a claw hammer.
Nothing in the physical realm lasts for eternity though, so whatever that Mac's ultimate demise may be, it won't be that.
Having said that I strongly suggest you familiarize yourself with lobsterghost1's User Tip The All Too Common SAD Reality of Buying a Used iPad/iPhone - Apple Community. Although it is obviously written for iOS devices, its principles apply equally to Macs.
Some senior ASC contributors whose opinions I respect will advise "never buy a used Mac". I stop short of making such an overarching statement, but the more I learn about problems people encounter with Macs that have not been properly prepared for sale the more I tend to agree with it. Those problems are very common, and sometimes insurmountable. In many cases the hapless purchaser is left with a Mac that cannot be used or returned for a refund. Don't buy a used Mac.
constantin245 wrote:
Macbook Air 2020 Retina, Mac OS Sequoia.
[...]
And how can a MacBook user predict that a hard drive might fail? After all, in this case, the data will be lost.
One cannot predict with certainty when any drive might fail, only that all will eventually. Which is exactly one reason why Apple gives you the means to backup your Mac with Time Machine. The only thing you have to bring to that party is an external HDD or SSD with the appropriate capacity.
The Time Machine software is built in to every Mac. Use it or lose it.
To add to Servant of Cats‘ response, you will unfortunately not be able to estimate how long your hard drive (SSD) will last on a technical level. You can take the time of manufacturing and add the relatively safe 5 years. Everything further is mostly taking chances, even if I wouldn’t expect your hard drive to be dead by then, or even after 10 years. But you never know.
FYI, I would not recommend buying either of these MacBook Airs at this point.
The 2020 Intel-based model originally shipped with macOS 10.15.3 (Catalina), so it can't run anything earlier, and wouldn't be able to run old 32-bit applications. With respect to current applications, it's already unable to run the latest version of macOS. it may have been a good machine in its day, but that day is drawing to a close.
Apple currently uses plain M4 chips in 13" and 15" MacBook Airs – and plain M5 chips in entry-level 14" MacBook Pros. So the processor in the 13" M1 MacBook Air is three or four generations behind the current ones. That first Apple-Silicon-based MacBook Air also
Single-core CPU benchmark scores for M4, M1, and 2020 Intel-based MacBook Airs:
Metal (GPU) benchmark scores for M4 and M1 MacBook Airs. MacTracker didn't have scores for 2020 Intel ones, but they presumably would have been lower than the M1's. You can get current MacBook Pros with your choice of plain M5, M4 Pro, or M4 Max chips, all of which would score higher than the plain M4 chip.
How to check MacBook Air 2020 Retina hard drive status
