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.