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
Mac mini, macOS 26.5
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.
read
Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology - Wikipedia
it mean the harddrive is not in a good place
FROM 100 to 99 is it a problem
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 . . .
I bought it in September of 2025
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.
how to disable it
no nothing like that doing web browsing, earlier I used to play sneaky Sasquatch was it an problem.
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.
mine is here
[Edited by Moderator]
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.
Remember that Activity Monitor only shows the details since the last boot.
When did you last Start/Restart your mini?
no, I do shut down every day
I guess spotlight was the criminal because everything was selected
it did not stop
[Edited by Moderator]
what is this smart and why is its health going down
