what is this smart and why is its health going down

weeklycod wrote:

S.M.A.R.T. Details: 3% used, 29.28 TB written, 99% health, 19 unsafe shutdowns.

what is this smart and why is its health going down

<etrecheckPro report.log>

I don't see any problem. In 8 months 30 TB was written, your drive shows 99% health. An SSD can likely handle several thousand TB of writes in its lifetime, yours may have on the order of 30-50 years left to go, I doubt the power supply or logic board would last for even anywhere close to that long. My oldest Mac still healthy and running is a 2010 MacBook Air. I don't think it is even practical to keep a Mac running for more than 10 years or so since security updates cease long before that and in the case of my 2019 MacBook Pro, Tahoe is the last MacOS it will be able to run. That 2019 laptop is running excellently but I will likely get a new one soon so I can stay current on software and OS.

For reference, my 2019 MacBook Pro (7 years old), 98 GB written over the past 4 days, 33 TB written so far over its lifetime, 1% used, 99% health. This laptop is on 24/7, used every day. I run everything with standard MacOS settings, Spotlight on and available, Time Machine running on two external drives every hour, no runaway processes observed, MacOS 26.5.1.

weeklycod, I see from your multiple posts that you seem to have some concerns about the health of your Mac. Because your Mac has only 250 GB of storage, free storage may present an ongoing challenge in the future but nothing you have posted looks anomalous and you currently have 100 GB free which is excellent. Your M4 Mini is a very fast state of the art machine and you should relax and enjoy and and not worry when you don't need to.

So you have had it 8 months which suggests another 24+ years of use. Of course your Mac will die from something else long before that.

However, 30 TB is quite a huge amount for 8 months. My M4 is just over a year old and has written about 6 TB.

Are you doing some pretty intensive editing of large videos?

Actually, the figure of 3% looks a bit suspect as the 256 GB SSD of the base model M4 probably has a lifespan of around 300 TB which means 30 TB would represent 10% of its life or in your case another 7 years.

If you are not using your Mac intensively there may be something else causing excessive data writes.

In 2023 shortly after buying an M2 mini I discovered it was writing around 100 GB per day when normally the figure would be no more than 10 - 15 GB.

I tracked this down to Spotlight and its associated helpers. The weird thing is that these huge writes never appeared on the SSD . . . it was as though they were being written and instantly erased.

I spotted the excessive writes by looking at Activity Monitor/Disks which demonstrated them vividly.

The cure was to disable Spotlight completely in System Settings.

I ran into a very similar issue with a past Tahoe update. On the order of 100GB or more per day was being written to the internal SSD but SSD space used was changing very little and all the change could be accounted for.

Through a lot of painstaking testing over a few weeks I found one of the Spotlight daemons was the cause. In addition by disabling Spotlight search of folders starting with my entire home directory and slowly enabling folders one by one I found there was a particular folder that Spotlight was seeing as changing constantly even though nothing in that folder was changing. Hiding that folder from Spotlight search dropped the writes from 100+GB per day to around 4-5GB.

Then, after the following Tahoe update, all went back to normal and excessive writes went away. So it seemed to me that there was something in that folders structure or content that Spotlight was mis-interpreting as changing constant.

So, you could simply try and disable Spotlight search of your user folder in the Spotlight privacy settings and see if the issue goes away. Be aware though, that Spotlight has become a core function of macOS and is used as a database collection agent for all sorts of macOS operations and that some functions will not be available.

Just to reiterate . . . the main thing is to check that you are no longer getting the excessive writes so check AM every day to ensure it's behaving reasonably.

Incidentally there is no point in shutting down every day. It is unlikely to make your Mac last longer, in fact quite the reverse as shutting down and frequently starting up put unnecessary stress on the system.

When I got my first computer 25 years ago I used to shut it down whenever I finished using it (several times a day!) until a few years later when I learned to put it to sleep.

Sleeping is the kindest way to treat it with maybe a restart every week or so to clear things out.

Open System Settings and deselect everything in Spotlight and then scroll down to the bottom right and click on "Search Privacy . . . " when a window will open.

You then need to add every drive (including the internal) that you have connected to the Mac so that Spotlight will never try to index them.

Another (remote) possibility comes to mind.

Maybe early on your Mac was suffering from excessive writes similar to my experience with Spotlight and then an update was installed that cured it.

In any case, keep a regular eye on Activity Monitor and investigate further if you find you are getting more than about 20 GB per day unless you are downloading a lot or doing something else that could account for it.

One of the best things you can do to keep the SSD free from clutter is to buy a USB plugin drive on which to put anything big like photos and videos.

It doesn't even have to be an SSD as an "old" HDD will work perfectly well.

Something like these Toshibas are fine but note that prices have doubled in the last year thanks to AI cornering the chip market. You could get the 4 TB one a year ago for under £90.

Toshiba USB HDDs

You have written nearly 30 TB of data which is quite a lot for a Mac that's only been around for 18 months.

However, it's less than a thirtieth so if that 30 TB took a year to accumulate you have another 30 years before you need to start worrying!

Of course if you only bought the Mac a month ago . . .

Take a look at Activity Monitor.

This is my M4 taken a minute ago.

Activity Monitor shows the activity of the various components since the last boot which in my case was over 15 days ago.

As you can see it has written about 326 GB of Data which represents just over 20 GB per day which is reasonable as I have been copying and downloading a fair amount recently.

The process name on the left shows the main culprits in descending order . . . except most of it would be the downloads which are not listed.

Ian R. Brown wrote:

Are you suggesting that 30 TB written in 8 months given the usage he described is perfectly normal?

I can't think of anyone who would claim that. Something very untoward is (or has been) occurring.

If it is still happening it needs sorting out whereas if it has stopped, everyone can breathe a sigh of relief.

I provided a contrasting example, my laptop which has 30 TB over 7 years of being on 24/7, versus the OP's 30 TB in 8 months. But people use their computers for many different things. The SSD in the OP's Mac should be able to last for another several decades even if continuing at that high rate, but there was some discussion that the early pattern had in fact been alleviated. Also, the Etrecheck report did not show any red flags. In fact it showed Excellent performance.

If you believe something "untoward" is or has been occurring, please elaborate to back up that assertion. The OP reported no issues with their Mac, "no problems, just checking."

This is the problem:

Major Issues: Anything that appears on this list needs immediate attention. No Time Machine backup - Time Machine backup not found.

You can continue to use any mass storage device to the point of failure.

Everything in the physical world fails... eventually.

If you really have no backup, it means — by definition — that you have absolutely no concern whatsoever about the data stored on that device. The prospect of its complete and sudden irretrievable disappearance does not concern you at all.

Is that correct? If so, then no worries.

read

Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology - Wikipedia

it mean the harddrive is not in a good place

weeklycod wrote:

I bought it in September of 2025

Respectfully, the user is somewhat incorrect on date of purchase

We could Pre-Order the M4 Mac Mini, but it was only available on October 28, 2024

The Out of the Box M4 Mac Mini I received , as part of the Pre-Order process, on that date, was loaded with Sequoia macOS 15.0  ( 24A8332 )

That was a Special Build unique to the M4 Chipset

To compare yours to mine >>> S.M.A.R.T. Details: 0% used, 5.62 TB written, 100% health, 2 unsafe shutdowns <<<

========================

What is the lifespan of my SSD?

All Credit to our colleague @ HWTech 👍

Quote 

" Apple SSDs typically last 5 to 10+ years, often exceeding 150–300+ Terabytes Written (TBW). 

While Apple does not disclose specific ratings, they generally endure at least 3,000 erase-write cycles, meaning most users will replace their Mac long before the SSD fails, even with high daily usage " 

End Quote 

weeklycod wrote:

I did say, as one year warranty is covered without apple plus if I am not wrong and my device support is ending in

Official Apple Support Community

owl please check through apple Id coverage website

You are right and my faux pass

Though, it is IMHO you might be micro-managing this disk read and write issue

SSD drives have reasonably long life before that cease to function

From experience with an other 2023 M2 Mac Mini with 8 GB Unified RAM and the tinniest of tiny 256 GB SSD

It still works as good as or better than when it originally arrive with macOS 13 Ventura Oct 22, 2023, macOS 13.4 ( 22F66 ), Out of the Box

You will know very fast when the SSD fails

When it does fail, it will happen without any warning

Just to reinforce this contention

Hardware Information:

    Mac mini (2023)

        Status: Supported

    Mac mini Model: Mac14,3

    Apple M2 (m2) CPU: 8-core

    8 GB RAM - Not upgradeable

Video Information:

    Apple M2

        LC50LBU591C 3840 x 2160

Drives:

    disk0 - APPLE SSD AP0256Z 251.00 GB (Solid State - TRIM: Yes)

    Internal Apple Fabric NVM Express

    S.M.A.R.T. Details: 0% used, 5.52 TB written, 100% health, 16 unsafe shutdowns