38 ms·

M1 Mac owners are experiencing high SSD writes over short periods of time

691 points by voisin 6y ago

musicale 6y ago
I was worried until I noticed the words "Hard Drive" in the title.
- Jonnax 6y ago
  M1 Macs all have SSDs.
- pier25 6y ago
  Terrible title as this is actually about SSDs.
  - Apocryphon 6y ago
    And the actual article says "Solid State Drive" - could be posted differently here to dodge the character count limit.
    - pier25 6y ago
      Dang probably changed the URL. The original URL did say "hard drives".
- W-Stool 6y ago
  Poorly worded - this problem applies to SSDs.
lainga 6y ago
The link is just a link to https://www.imore.com/m1-mac-users-report-alarming-hard-drive-health-readings https://www.imore.com/m1-mac-users-report-alarming-hard-driv...
- fuzzer37 6y ago
  And in turn thats just a link to LTT forms[0] what's your point? [0] https://linustechtips.com/topic/1306757-m1-mac-owners-are-experiencing-extremely-high-ssd-writes-over-short-periods-of-time-likely-thanks-to-aggressive-swap/ https://linustechtips.com/topic/1306757-m1-mac-owners-are-ex...
api 6y ago
I wonder if it's swapping a ton, especially on machines with 8G RAM? 8G is pathetic for 2021 anyway. Would never go under 16G for a serious machine.
- JudasGoat 6y ago
  Have to agree, I am using a Thinkpad T420 released in 2011 with 16GB. My upgrade will hopefully have a 32GB capacity.
  - flatiron 6y ago
    I have 32 GB and rarely use the second 16.
    - foolmeonce 6y ago
      With 24GB, I rarely needed it all, but a good portion was cache/buffer, I.e. 10GB. Of course you can just swap to SSD and get pretty much the same performance, until you don't..
    - thitcanh 6y ago
      I have 16GB, I haven't done much today, I use Safari with 7 tabs and have Spotify and GitHub Desktop open. Memory used: 10GB Uptime: 1d I don't know, feels like OP is right. 16GB is not enough in 2021, especially since I my computer is from 2013 and already had 16GB. Unfortunately this is where Apple decided to make money, so we have brand-new 8GB $1000 devices in 2021. Thanks Apple.
- intrasight 6y ago
  Perhaps not a "serious machine" (that's subjective), but is well-specced for it's intended audience, and reviews are generally very positive.
- imwillofficial 6y ago
  So I have a MacBook with 16gb ram for work, and an M1 MacBook with 8GB Normal usage on the Intel MacBook, ~10GB, on the air with similar workload ~5GB Not apples to apples for sure, but there is some magic going on with the M1. Perhaps the different instruction set?
martini333 6y ago
150 TB of data in 2 months is hopefully not correct. Something is wrong.
- Reason077 6y ago
  Yeah. My 2017 MacBook Pro (256 GB Apple SSD) reports: Available Spare: 79% Available Spare Threshold: 2% Percentage Used: 15% Data Units Read: 251,550,023 [128 TB] Data Units Written: 228,761,896 [117 TB] But this is after 3.5 years of use.
  - sponaugle 6y ago
    Yea, my MacBook Pro, 2018 Percentage Used: 2% Data Units Read: 84,461,830 [43.2 TB] Data Units Written: 69,369,816 [35.5 TB] Host Read Commands: 2,125,724,765 Host Write Commands: 1,440,781,009 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 117 Power On Hours: 1,253
Jonnax 6y ago
Such high swap usage sounds like a bug. But at the same time. 8GB of ram isn't a lot. Especially when multi tasking. I know there was a lot of talk about Apple's directly soldered RAM being super efficient. But if you've got 30 tabs open, playing music and using Photoshop. No amount of optimisation is going to prevent swap usage. Still though. Terrabytes of usage must be a bug.
- spideymans 6y ago
  Apparently the issue affects the 16 GB models as well. In that case, the SSD wear likely would not be related to the limited RAM in the 8 GB model.
  - ComputerGuru 6y ago
    Presumably people getting 16GB of RAM are also running more memory intensive workloads than those not shelling out for the upgrade, so it could be a non-factor.
    - post_break 6y ago
      16GB ram M1 user, haven't seen a KB of swap since I don't do memory intensive stuff, just wanted to future proof.
- Bud 6y ago
  We're no longer talking about "directly soldered RAM"; in the M1 Macs, the RAM is now part of the M1 chip itself. It's on the CPU die.
  - fredoralive 6y ago
    No, the RAM is separate chips / dies, albeit incorporated into the same module as the CPU. On pictures of the M1[1], the RAM is the plastic covered chips next to the main heat spreader for the SoC. [1] Such as the image on the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1
tus89 6y ago
I wonder if they have Google Chrome installed. I recall people complaining about it chewing up measurable chunks of their SSD life a few years ago.
tomg 6y ago
How to find this on your own macOS drives: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/135565/how-do-i-get-detailed-smart-disk-information-on-os-x-mavericks-or-later https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/135565/how-do-i-ge...
therealmarv 6y ago
This has to be wrong readings, is the M1 swapping really totally different? My normal last gen Intel Mac has 0% usage and it's nearly one year old (yes, I use it nearly daily).
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  From the sounds of it, the same reading they are using to suggest the M1 will only last 1-2 years has been observed on older Macs. So this whole thing seems overblown.
- abiogenesis 6y ago
  It's probably macOS doing something differently when run on an M1.
gnicholas 6y ago
How does AppleCare deal with SSD issues like this? I have heard that for batteries, they'll replace if the maximum usable capacity is below 80% of what it should be. I assume they've had a similar policy for SSD? Arguably the SSD is even more critical than the battery, because you can at least hypothetically use a laptop plugged in.
- randyrand 6y ago
  Apple care only lasts 3 years. So pretty rare issue I imagine. new logic board.
  - gnicholas 6y ago
    Yes, I imagine it has been very rare in the past. I'm wondering if anyone has come across the issue before (or has a friend who works at Apple and knows the rules). I would hope that if they give you a new logic board that they'd at least be able to transfer your data. I know that they always make you sign a waiver saying that you've backed everything up and if you lose the data that's fine. Hopefully they would at least try to transfer the data for you, if this turns out to be a bug like it sounds like.
king_magic 6y ago
It's gotta be a bug. Hopefully this will get on Apple's radar. Edit: for what it's worth, here's my stats from my 8GB M1 MacBook Air after ~2 months of continuous heavy usage as my main work machine: Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 4,622,487 [2.36 TB] Data Units Written: 2,301,067 [1.17 TB] Which feels reasonable. So doesn't seem like it affects everyone equally.
- xvector 6y ago
  > on Apple's radar. (For those not aware, Radar is the name of Apple’s internal bug filing system ;)
  - Google234 6y ago
    I believe access is given to outsiders too
    - saagarjha 6y ago
      Only if you’re a partner of some sort, and even then your access is going to be fairly limited.
- qeternity 6y ago
  My 3 month old 8gb MBP Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 1% Data Units Read: 53,339,111 [27.3 TB] Data Units Written: 49,807,244 [25.5 TB]
  - jghn 6y ago
    Here's mine, 8GB M1 Air with 314 power on hours Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 3% Data Units Read: 231,234,195 [118 TB] Data Units Written: 182,951,675 [93.6 TB]
floatingatoll 6y ago
The first line of the smartctl output everyone's bandying about says that a total of 1% of the drive's capacity has been used, which means that in about 16.5 years (2 months * 99 / 12) their drive will go readonly. What, exactly, is the problem with that? It seems like there are a lot of assumptions in play in this "headline news": (1) assuming that the reported numbers are valid for this measurement at all (2) that they are not a bug in the IOKit implementation used by smartctl (3) that they are not not a bug in smartctl itself (4) that they are directly comparable to non-M1 hardware without further processing (5) that they do not increment when Time Machine or other filesystem snapshots occur (6) that they do not increment when APFS copy-on-writes occur (7) that they do not include the total byte size of sparsely-modified files I don't see anyone checking these assumptions yet, but if y'all do, supporting links on those points would improve this HN post considerably. There are other assumptions that could be tested too! Outrage is cool, but science is productive.
- faitswulff 6y ago
  > 1% of the drive's capacity has been used, which means that in about 16.5 years (2 months * 99 / 12) their drive will go readonly. Makes me wonder if the engineers at Apple decided it was an acceptable trade off.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - Google234 6y ago
    Yes, no one uses 16 year old laptops
    - faitswulff 6y ago
      Nearly no one, I would venture to guess.
      - rovr138 6y ago
        This couch side laptop I use to read and search things is a 2011 MBA. Not 16, but maybe it'll make it...
threeseed 6y ago
From reports this isn't specific to M1 Mac users. If you're on a Mac you can run "sudo fs_usage" to see what is writing to/from your disk.
- sneak 6y ago
  M1 can't run pre-11.0 (Big Sur), so this might be a Big Sur issue.
- skinner_ 6y ago
  Thanks! I have run this command now (not on an M1 but on a 2018 MacBook Pro), and I'm reporting that 31% of my file system accesses were coming from ESET Security (namely esets_daemon, esets_proxy, ERAAgent, esets_gui), and 19% from Chrome. I'm actually using Chrome, but if ESET degrades the SSD lifespan by 31%, I'm gonna be annoyed.
qeternity 6y ago
This is completely anecdotal with nothing to back it up but it seemed like I swap far more aggressively when I have x86 processes running...not sure if this is related to Rosetta 2
whatever1 6y ago
Got my base M1 mini with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD on February 13th. With just simple content consumption (browser, Spotify, messaging) as of now it has written over 20TB of data! That is insane.
- endless1234 6y ago
  The entire drive 8 times over per day? That can't be right. With 8 hours of usage per day, that's 70 MB/s constant writing. Really?
  - whatever1 6y ago
    I don’t switch it off, so that I can have remote access to It, but 20TB in 10 days sounds a lot. Also worth noting that I see my swap fluctuating from 6-8GB almost all the time (granted I have multiple browser tabs and windows, maybe like 10-30 ish ?)
- gazby 6y ago
  I'd be willing to bet that in looking deeper you'd find it's Spotify doing the lion's share of that.
  - tandr 6y ago
    Can we ask them not to do it somehow?
    - hmage 6y ago
      Spotify was caught before (in 2016) doing exactly that -- https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/for-five-months-spotify-has-badly-abused-users-storage-drives/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/for-f... Only after publication on news sites they fixed it. Won't be surprised if the bug regressed and happened again. I don't use Spotify (not available in my country), so I wouldn't know, but I bet half of the reports are because of some badly written third party app constantly writing in 4kb chunks with O_DIRECT or fsync() all the time.
muppetman 6y ago
Can't this easily be a userspace app overwriting a logfile or something thousands of times over? Spotify is rebuilding a cache in the background every minute, or some audio editing app misuses a sqlite database and it's writing the same stuff every second etc? Any app/program can write to the disk. Why this is being framed as a hardware/OS error?
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  My first thought when reading about this is that logging gone awry is a very likely cause. Could be the OS itself or apps doing it, but in either case a fix should be pretty reasonable.
  - fomine3 6y ago
    I think logging can't be a problem for recent NVMe SSD (but problem for small eMMC on cars).
  - bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
    Reminds me of this: https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/07/27/vmware-virtualbox-tools-impacted-by-macos-catalina-memory-leaks https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/07/27/vmware-virtualbox... > The engineer explains problem relates to a "regression in the com.apple.security.sandbox kext (or one of its related components)" in macOS 10.15.6. As part of the investigation, it was discovered com.apple.security.sandbox was allocating millions of blocks of memory containing just the text "/dev" and no other data.
- tyingq 6y ago
  Maybe they transitioned from an earlier MacBook and feel like they are running the same apps? Though, of course, new architecture means that's a bad assumption.
- marcos100 6y ago
  The problem is that the ssd is not replaceable and people are saying the main cause of this heavy writing is the swapping to disk. So a hardware/OS problem. I think it wouldn't get a lot of attention if the ssd could be replaced.
SXX 6y ago
So it's looks bad on my Macbook Air M1 16GB: Percentage Used: 3% Data Units Read: 47,004,809 [24.0 TB] Data Units Written: 47,469,528 [24.3 TB] Host Read Commands: 153,293,725 Host Write Commands: 218,787,006 It's been in-use for two months only and I haven't even compiled anythig on it and all my usage was: light gaming in few 2D games, Firefox and some films. UPD: it's 256GB SSD model.
- tyingq 6y ago
  How big of a drive is it? So far, most of the 3%+ used ones have 2TB drives, which is the opposite of what you would naively expect.
  - bombcar 6y ago
    On my older (3+ year now) MPB 16 with a 512GB drive I get: SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 41 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 10% Percentage Used: 22% Data Units Read: 621,054,721 [317 TB] Data Units Written: 483,003,547 [247 TB] Host Read Commands: 9,028,855,382 Host Write Commands: 3,924,827,022 Controller Busy Time: 16,789 Power Cycles: 8,373 Power On Hours: 6,828 Unsafe Shutdowns: 375 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 271
    - nixgeek 6y ago
      Wow. How long ago did you get the MBP 16"? I've been running this system as my daily driver for >12 months and see very different numbers from you: smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [Darwin 20.4.0 x86_64] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Number: APPLE SSD AP8192N Serial Number: XXXXXXXXXXXXX Firmware Version: 1161.100 PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID: 0x106b IEEE OUI Identifier: 0x000000 Controller ID: 0 NVMe Version: <1.2 Number of Namespaces: 1 Local Time is: Tue Feb 23 17:01:28 2021 PST Firmware Updates (0x02): 1 Slot Optional Admin Commands (0x0004): Frmw_DL Optional NVM Commands (0x0004): DS_Mngmt Maximum Data Transfer Size: 256 Pages Supported Power States St Op Max Active Idle RL RT WL WT Ent_Lat Ex_Lat 0 + 0.00W - - 0 0 0 0 0 0 === START OF SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 37 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 53,827,033 [27.5 TB] Data Units Written: 37,342,497 [19.1 TB] Host Read Commands: 704,072,000 Host Write Commands: 669,901,451 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 234 Power On Hours: 528 Unsafe Shutdowns: 74 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0
dang 6y ago
Url changed from https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/m1-mac-users-poor-ssd-health/ https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/m1-mac-users-poor-ssd-hea..., which points to this.
miles 6y ago
Perhaps setting the noatime flag might help? Reducing Disk IO By Mounting Partitions With noatime https://www.howtoforge.com/reducing-disk-io-by-mounting-partitions-with-noatime https://www.howtoforge.com/reducing-disk-io-by-mounting-part... OS X - Setting No-Access-Time on OS X SSD Volumes https://dpron.com/os-x-noatime-multiple-ssds/ https://dpron.com/os-x-noatime-multiple-ssds/ Optimizing MacOS X Lion for SSD http://blog.alutam.com/2012/04/01/optimizing-macos-x-lion-for-ssd/#noatime http://blog.alutam.com/2012/04/01/optimizing-macos-x-lion-fo... Mac OS X SSD tweaks https://www.icyte.com/saved/blogs.nullvision.com/441781 https://www.icyte.com/saved/blogs.nullvision.com/441781
- GekkePrutser 6y ago
  It'll reduce writes but it doesn't explain the huge numbers. Considering the atime updates are only ever one block.
blinkingled 6y ago
For comparison here's the nvme smart-log for my 2.5 year old X1 Carbon running Linux - used for VSCode/compiles and browsing/ssh etc. carbonx  ~  sudo nvme smart-log /dev/nvme0n1 Smart Log for NVME device:nvme0n1 namespace-id:ffffffff critical_warning : 0 temperature : 29 C available_spare : 100% available_spare_threshold : 10% percentage_used : 0% endurance group critical warning summary: 0 data_units_read : 12,862,645 data_units_written : 16,193,903 host_read_commands : 124,284,317 host_write_commands : 218,295,105 controller_busy_time : 567 power_cycles : 3,078 power_on_hours : 558 unsafe_shutdowns : 209 media_errors : 0 So around 8.2 TB written in 2.5 years of daily use. And I have had syncthing running on it past few months to sync some git repos as an experiment. (And I run a rolling release distro so lots of updates.) In comparison the M1 data posted here looks out of whack. I generally use bpftrace to find if anything keeps writing to my SSD - for the most part I don't find any misbehaving programs on modern Linux distros. Assuming dtrace still works on M1 Macs you might be able to find what is writing to the disk.
- eulers_secret 6y ago
  Another Linux user data point: XPS13(9310)/512GB nvme/16GB RAM/2GB swapfile/kubuntu 20.10/kernel 5.11 (in use since ~Dec 5, 2020): SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 33 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 50% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 631,319 [323 GB] Data Units Written: 1,157,883 [592 GB] Host Read Commands: 4,650,820 Host Write Commands: 7,329,774 Controller Busy Time: 16 Power Cycles: 37 Power On Hours: 45 Unsafe Shutdowns: 15 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 1 Warning Comp. Temperature Time: 0 Critical Comp. Temperature Time: 0 I do Linux kernel dev and have done quite a few kernel compiles at this point (using Ubuntu's full config) as well as general browsing and some Docker workloads and Spotify... Judging by 'Power On Hours' combined with 'Data Units Written', looks like there's a bug to me. As a side, I don't know why 'Available Spare Threshold' is 50%, and the 1 'Error Information Log Entries' appears to be successful results of some test.
throwaway888abc 6y ago
Youtube is/was disk killer for some reason. Used to listen a lot of music from it, but the constant heavy disk usage put me off. 16GB on Linux, zero swapping, Chrome browser. Switched to old school MP3 playing via Audacity and never looked back. You can see what is wearing your disk under process / activity manager. The M1 behaviour can it be Chrome + Youtube,Netflix,Spotify usage related? 2c
0xfacfac 6y ago
Nice, LTT made it to the #1 of HN. :clap:
alphabettsy 6y ago
Maybe there’s a common application at fault here?
hayksaakian 6y ago
MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports) (1 year old) Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 23,095,006 [11.8 TB] Data Units Written: 22,728,206 [11.6 TB] Host Read Commands: 436,520,152 Host Write Commands: 414,121,166
mugivarra69 6y ago
that is most likely due to swapping .
SirensOfTitan 6y ago
14TB written on my 4 week old m1 mbp with 256 GB. Ridiculous.
m000 6y ago
Yeah, it's a bug. But don't go crazy over it. Back in 2016, a Spotify bug resulted in writes of approximately 700GB/day [1]. No SSD died, judging from the lack of a class action lawsuit. And at least for my MBP SSD, I can tell you it is still doing very much alright, despite being thrashed for anywhere between a few weeks to a few months. Having said that, do apply any temporary fix. Even if the effect will probably be negligible, it's still unnecessary wear. [1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/239268-spotify-may-killing-ssd https://www.extremetech.com/computing/239268-spotify-may-kil...
salusinarduis 6y ago
I had this exact issue and had to disable SIP to disable swap because I was swapping over 2TB a day. Everyone I chatted to online about it jumped over themselves to tell me I was an idiot, and I somehow needed to swap even though I have 16gb ram. Needless to say I'm having a little chuckle. It's a lesson for us all about blindly believing things.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  Did you notice any performance hit after disabling swap? Even 16 Gb RAM doesn't seem enough ...
  - salusinarduis 6y ago
    Not a thing, though I didn't benchmark! Only stupid thing is you can't run iOS apps while SIP is disabled, and re-enabling SIP turns swap back on. iOS apps aren't something I care about so it doesn't really affect me.
ngvrnd 6y ago
What tools are you using to measure this?
outside1234 6y ago
2.5 year old 32GB RAM Macbook Pro on Intel for contrast (developer workload over that timeframe): Percentage Used: 4% Data Units Read: 151,520,338 [77.5 TB] Data Units Written: 102,518,209 [52.4 TB] Host Read Commands: 3,014,199,390 Host Write Commands: 2,371,675,100
- johncalvinyoung 6y ago
  3.2 year old 16GB MBP w/ 1TB on Intel (heavy developer workload): Percentage Used: 5% Data Units Read: 498,780,988 [255 TB] Data Units Written: 265,225,887 [135 TB] Host Read Commands: 6,633,264,962 Host Write Commands: 2,911,463,422
Huwyt_Nashi022 6y ago
I blame the blacks.
blkhp19 6y ago
Www
whichdan 6y ago
Baseline M1 MBA, about 1 month of regular usage Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 9,670,166 [4.95 TB] Data Units Written: 6,898,714 [3.53 TB] Host Read Commands: 75,916,955 Host Write Commands: 41,914,954 Power Cycles: 80 Fwiw, my swap tends to hover around 2.5-3gb lately
sigjuice 6y ago
I hope this doesn't get "fixed" in the next update by making it impossible to run smartctl.
- webmobdev 6y ago
  I was going to comment, "That's a stupid thing to say" but then realised who we are talking about ...
tbrock 6y ago
This is total trash, I've had my M1 MacBook Air for >2 months and it shows 0% used. I've got the 512GB SSD / 16GB ram model. I'm using it HARD for 12 hours a day so YMMV...
macawfish 6y ago
For such small drives, why can't they just splurge a little and put some high endurance SSDs in?
tzs 6y ago
For comparison, my 2017 iMac with 1 TB SSD gives: Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 10% Percentage Used: 1% Data Units Read: 109,446,813 [56.0 TB] Data Units Written: 68,569,966 [35.1 TB] Host Read Commands: 2,922,206,492 Host Write Commands: 2,180,242,949 Controller Busy Time: 4,463 Power Cycles: 13,345 This is after 40 months, during which it has been my main computer for both home and work. So about 10.5 TB of writes per year. Prior to the iMac I had a 2008 Mac Pro for work and a 2009 Mac Pro for home. Those were doing about 7.8 TB per year of writes combined, but that includes an SSD on the home one that was used for Time Machine. Subtracting out that, it was about 5.2 TB per year combined writes, so about half of what I do on the iMac.
ksec 6y ago
On the Subject of Swap and SSD write I have previously reported many issues to Apple over the years. Earliest report going back to 2016. And of course heard no feedback as usual. You may want to check Activity Monitor > Disk > Kernel_Task for Disk Write. This shows how much swaps write, along with other apps you have been using since your last reboot. You can check your last reboot time in System Information > Software. Currently Launchd wrote 50GB which I have no idea why. Corespotlightd wrote 70GB. And SafariBookMarkagent with 4GB. And Kernel_Task 4.5TB. These numbers are over the course of 30 days. Generally speaking Mac has been very Swap heavy for a long time. And Big Sur seems to be pushing this further as there are evidence shown this isn't seems to be specific to M1. On Safari, if you have lots of Tabs, Clicking Tab Overview will force all Tabs to Reload. Which will write hundreds of GB of Data if you have lots of Tab, especially if they were originally sitting idle. ( i.e You close Safari and you reopen it where Tabs not focused are not loaded ). If you have iCloud Drive, there may be some cases where you are downloading few hundreds GB of iCloud Data a day if you have certain Apps that constantly update its files. WhatsApp Backup used to ( and may still be the case ) cause this problem if you have a large WhatsApp History. WhatsApp download a 50GB copy, only to realise it has a new copy on iCloud and re-download again. Doing it many times per day. Assuming some tweaked options, iCloud could be downloading all of your iPhone / iPad Backup to your Mac as cache. Again, if you have 100GB of Backup and that is downloaded once or twice per day. It adds up. Disabling iCloud Drive tends to help. Last time we had Electron Apps, or specifically Spotify making hundreds of GB per write per day due to a bug. But as usual, Apple apologist around the world are quick to point out these are non-issues. Luckily HN still have some sanity. Hopefully this is finally enough to finally push Apple to fix it. Windows or Linux doesn't have the same write data count even when the usage pattern are roughly the same.
- rvz 6y ago
  Best part is that the SSD is soldered into the board and it can't be replaced. Even worse. In this case for the M1 Macs when the SSD dies, the Mac becomes bricked and if you have no backups then the data on the dead SSD is lost. A typical web dev may rely on running a couple of electron apps, docker, IntelliJ and lots of chrome tabs to get their work done. Alongside everyday use looks to me that the life of this SSD is going to be shortened very quickly. I already said this before [0] and it seems to them 'it is not an issue.' Well here we are and this thread is full of other concerned users. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26150405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26150405
kelchm 6y ago
Just to add some more data here, M1 MBA 16GB Ram / 256GB SSD which I've been using for almost exactly two months: SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 34 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 5,315,871 [2.72 TB] Data Units Written: 2,249,290 [1.15 TB]
- SXX 6y ago
  What is your most used software? Are you using Firefox or Chrome?
  - kelchm 6y ago
    This is my personal machine, so primarily using it nights/weekends for thinking with embedded development projects and web browsing lately. I was using Firefox, but have recently switched Safari full time. It just seems to run better and isn't as brutal on the battery.
    - SXX 6y ago
      Thanks. So far it actually looks like Firefox is somewhat heavy on writes.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
and0rskr 6y ago
My Macbook M1 Air (6 days old) Available Spare: 100%. Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 4,645,245 [2.37 TB] Data Units Written: 4,045,006 [2.07 TB] Host Read Commands: 30,123,041 Host Write Commands: 17,403,647 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 85 Power On Hours: 18
Beefin 6y ago
These SSDs are going to be dropping like flies unless Apple produces a firmware update soon... has Apple responded?
- SilverRed 6y ago
  The real problem here is that the M1 macbooks do not have a replaceable SSD. Even without this issue, SSDs do die sometimes and on every non Apple laptop you just buy a new m.2 sdd and everything is all good. I have had macbook SSDs die in the past and thanks to it being a swappable module back then, it was no big deal.
  - rvz 6y ago
    > The real problem here is that the M1 macbooks do not have a replaceable SSD. Even without this issue, SSDs do die sometimes and on every non Apple laptop you just buy a new m.2 sdd and everything is all good. In the past, when the SSD dies on these older Macbooks, you just replace the SSD with a new one. Very important for long term use when it eventually goes out of warranty, since there would be no need to go to the Apple Store to get it replaced for a fee. On the M1 Macbooks, thats it. It's bricked and your data is lost and no way to recover it. (If you didn't backup in advance) You might as well buy another one. In my case, I will continue to use my old Macbook and wait until Apple fixes the excessive writes or swapping issues in a newer version of macOS. By then I would be getting a Macbook with a newer M1X or M2 processor that doesn't have the excessive swapping issues and the software ecosystem for Apple Silicon would already have caught up with it and will be optimised for the processor. I said it before with Apple products [0] [1] [2] [3], I always ignore the first generation unless you want to be a bleeding edge beta tester trying to get work done or you're after collector editions. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25066248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25066248 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638202 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22852633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22852633 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22300515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22300515
MR4D 6y ago
My gut feeling is that this is an error of the reporting tool - or perhaps more specifically, an interpretation of the results. I think it is highly likely that these accesses are hitting some sort of cache (possibly page files, or SRAM, etc), not actually hitting the actual TLC/QLC part of the storage. Obviously I could be wrong, but I’d be surprised if Apple made this big of a mistake and didn’t catch it internally before now. If they did, then there are some serious quality issues in their process.
__warlord__ 6y ago
I guess Apple will disable these statistics for users similar to what they did with the "battery remaining time" back in the day (not that long ago :P). Written this from a mac mini m1 8Gb,256Gb
knz_ 6y ago
This looks overtly malicious. There's really no excuse for people to be seeing over 30TB of writes to their drives if they only use their system for browsing the web or dev work. My main NVMe drive's stats, after almost a year of ownership, after 3 OS installs (windows and linux, though I moved windows to a smaller less used sata ssd a few months ago) and frequently moving big files on/off network storage, installing games, and dev work for small personal projects etc: Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 10% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 200,214,119 [102 TB] Data Units Written: 27,304,663 [13.9 TB] Host Read Commands: 616,298,176 Host Write Commands: 387,970,043
- risyachka 6y ago
  It is just a bug that will be fixed. Literally happens with all kinds of systems and software. In case some SSDs already have big damage - will probably be replaced for free as usual.
new_realist 6y ago
M1 hardware can obviously swap to SSD without involving the OS much, and not at all on the prefetch/swapin path. That’s impressive.
deleted 6y ago
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pid_0 6y ago
Why am I surprised this is posted on LTT? He and his fans are so anti-apple its nauseating.
deleted 6y ago
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Beefin 6y ago
1 week old M1: SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 25 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 933,459 [477 GB] Data Units Written: 670,152 [343 GB] Host Read Commands: 15,779,474 Host Write Commands: 7,614,634 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 78 Power On Hours: 6 Unsafe Shutdowns: 3 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0
gabriel-uribe 6y ago
M1 MBA 8/256 after ~2 months: Percentage Used: 6% Data Units Read: 163,709,197 [83.8 TB] Data Units Written: 180,048,189 [92.1 TB] Host Read Commands: 2,225,703,049 Host Write Commands: 1,729,134,696
lovelyviking 6y ago
macOS: How to Disable Homebrew Analytics In case you are not aware or do not want to send homebrew analytics here is how to turn it off: brew analytics off "According to their GitHub page, Homebrew’s anonymous user and event data have a 14 month retention period, which is the lowest possible for Google Analytics." https://www.macobserver.com/tips/quick-tip/disable-homebrew-analytics/ https://www.macobserver.com/tips/quick-tip/disable-homebrew-...
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ya1sec 6y ago
My 256GB SSD/8GB MBA, approaching three months: Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 5,170,416 [2.64 TB] Data Units Written: 2,977,938 [1.52 TB] Host Read Commands: 89,184,979 Host Write Commands: 34,892,977 Mostly being used for building web apps, somewhat heavy video editing loads, and messing around in python. Using a lot of different software, much of it (entire Adobe Suite) via rosetta. I'm not sure what to make of these stats yet. > Maybe we should consider listing which OS version everyone is using? I never updated from 11.0.1 and these stats seem comparatively low. Latest Big Sur is 11.2.1.
nknealk 6y ago
M1 air used mostly for VSCode and web browsing. I regularly see swap in the 1-3 GB range. I think I have < 100 hours of usage. SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 31 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 8,236,219 [4.21 TB] Data Units Written: 6,393,656 [3.27 TB] Host Read Commands: 86,536,748 Host Write Commands: 37,609,250
spear 6y ago
Why is "Available Spare Threshold" showing as 99% on these M1 SSDs? I believe normal SSDs are more on the order of 10%.
teterphiel 6y ago
Haven't seen this mentioned: I wake up to a double digit GB Finder process every other day. I leave it plugged in during the night. Wear is 3% or 48TB of writes.
- hmage 6y ago
  What finder extensions you have enabled? Disable them all, see if behaviour stays.
  - teterphiel 6y ago
    I don't have any as far as I can tell, but some 3rd party tool that interacts with Finder in some way could be the culprit..
malthaus 6y ago
crazy, day one m1 8gb ram with 512gb hd here. this laptop has never seen spotify and safari is my main browser - no compilation or other heavy ram use either. Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 44,414,705 [22.7 TB] Data Units Written: 38,739,583 [19.8 TB] Host Read Commands: 769,910,444 Host Write Commands: 421,693,825
- culopatin 6y ago
  Day one as in bought on release day or that you’ve had it for one day?
erwinh 6y ago
How do you get this print out of the disk usage?
- vanpythonista 6y ago
  You can use: brew install smartmontools && smartctl --all /dev/disk0 to get this data
jbverschoor 6y ago
14TB in 2 months here (1TB/16GB)
dougifresh94 6y ago
I've created a Google form to collect some data - https://forms.gle/ksV68PicxdPvgjzt8 https://forms.gle/ksV68PicxdPvgjzt8 Feel free to help crowdsource some data on the issue.
arrty88 6y ago
I purchased my M1 on Feb 16... haven't used her all that much since i have a 16" Pro for work. Does this look bad? Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 5,406,703 [2.76 TB] Data Units Written: 5,381,633 [2.75 TB] Host Read Commands: 27,309,330 Host Write Commands: 25,822,612
hmage 6y ago
Intel iMac I bought in november 2020 (~3 months of use) with 128GB of RAM, so it never swaps: SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 42 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 95,824,868 [49.0 TB] Data Units Written: 89,046,642 [45.5 TB] Host Read Commands: 1,365,215,816 Host Write Commands: 837,815,676 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 145 Power On Hours: 604 Looking at iosnoop I see dropbox, google drive, backbalze, arq and other programs heavily abusing my SSD with tons of small (4kb) writes. With age of 105 days, that's 433 GB/day. My SSD's block size is 45.5TB/89046642 which is ~512kb. 433 GB/day divided by blocksize is 9.8 hertz, meaning I've had apps write ~10 times per second on average. This corresponds with what I'm seeing at iosnoop. Tons of third party apps open files with O_DIRECT flag or call fsync() right after each write. SQLite databases are most common culprit, since by default it flushes to disk every small insert/replace. And every sqlite database I've seen by third party app just uses defaults (none of them are using WAL, for example). OS has to flush that to disk if O_DIRECT or fsync() is used, therefore leading to write amplification. https://www.sqlite.org/atomiccommit.html https://www.sqlite.org/atomiccommit.html -- Each insert gets into journal first, that's 4kb there, then index gets updated, that's another 4kb, and then it gets committed to main database, that's another 4kb. There might be more, but in what I'm observing in iosnoop it's coming as multiple of 3. And since I'm on 512kb SSD blocks, that's 1.5MB per single insert/update. I forced every sqlite database on my disk to be WAL and changed synchronous to NORMAL from default (FULL), and it reduced I/O activity greatly without any ill side effects in months, most likely developers of these apps aren't even aware of these tunables: https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_journal_mode https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_journal_mode https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_synchronous https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_synchronous
- perryh2 6y ago
  How did you change every sqlite db running on your system?
  - 6y ago
buckeye1941 6y ago
Many iOS apps use Realm DB which is memory mapped and calls fsync on every write. This wasn’t obvious to iPhone/iPad users but will wear out SSDs very quickly.
dpacmittal 6y ago
14 month old Dell Inspiron with 512GB nvme: SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 30 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 50% Percentage Used: 4% Data Units Read: 7,993,097 [4.09 TB] Data Units Written: 10,644,620 [5.45 TB] Host Read Commands: 93,990,757 Host Write Commands: 215,449,508 Controller Busy Time: 1,499 Power Cycles: 107 Power On Hours: 8,203 Unsafe Shutdowns: 21 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0 Warning Comp. Temperature Time: 0 Critical Comp. Temperature Time: 0 Temperature Sensor 1: 30 Celsius Thermal Temp. 1 Transition Count: 85 Thermal Temp. 2 Transition Count: 74 Thermal Temp. 1 Total Time: 340 Thermal Temp. 2 Total Time: 122
- culopatin 6y ago
  Hackintosh?
neilv 6y ago
The post alleges that this this is due to "aggressive swap". I suspect that the MacOS developers at Apple know their target hardware, so I'm wondering (if this is the situation) whether the developers realized it, but the product was shipped anyway. FWIW, even as a developer who mostly stays out of the kernel, swap has long been on my mind for Linux laptops (e.g., keeping pre-SSD spinning-rust hard drives sleeping), and I pretty much always disable swap, even on desktops. Part of the rationale is, if I can't fit all the processes in (now) several gigabytes of RAM, something probably needs an OOM-euthanizing.
- eru 6y ago
  Swap is most useful, when you (almost) never look at the swapped out data again. That might sound stupid, but it occurs often enough in practice: eg code or data structures that were only used when starting off the program in question. An optimally coded program wouldn't benefit from this. But real world programs often do.
  - mytherin 6y ago
    I wouldn't link the usefulness of swap to the quality of programs. It has a lot to do with user behavior. If a user opens 100 tabs in a web browser but never looks at most of them, swapping unused ones to disk if they don't fit in RAM anymore is a very useful behavior (considering the alternative is killing the entire program). You could argue an optimally coded program should do this themselves, however, that is not so easy when multiple programs are running concurrently and fighting for RAM. On an 8GB machine, how much RAM should your web browser use? The answer is "it depends". If there are no other programs running, it can use all 8GB. If you are running an IDE, a chat client and a compiler in the background, it should probably be using less. The individual programs don't have enough information to make this judgement call - and making very conservative estimates will lead to much more swapping than actually required. The operating system is in charge of allocating memory for all those programs and can effectively make the judgement of what should be swapped out or not.
  - xxs 6y ago
    If you hit the swap, there is no disk cache. Which is problematic on its right own.
dluong 6y ago
M1 MBA 8GB/256GB, mostly safari with ~20 tabs avg and youtube, no spotify Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 25,160,936 [12.8 TB] Data Units Written: 23,041,292 [11.7 TB] Host Read Commands: 207,408,853 Host Write Commands: 98,285,538 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 173 Power On Hours: 101
newbie578 6y ago
Has Apple responded? This is not a small issue..
flyinghamster 6y ago
And this is Exhibit A on why I don't want any computer I spend a lot of money on to have a non-replaceable SSD. Inevitably, it will turn into a brick, or at least a poor excuse for a laptop that only runs off external drives.
illustriousbear 6y ago
M1 macbook, 512gb hdd here. Anyone mind sharing their total "real" space. Mine is 494.38gb Thanks!
hn_is_great 6y ago
Why are people expecting apple to deliver high performance hardware? A macbook is an incredibly well designed (visually not technically) browser in a very slick aluminium case: if you expect more from it you will of course be disappointed. Am I the only person who thinks this??
alblue 6y ago
Over yet last few years the WiFi daemon insists in writing content to the /var/log/wifi.log and friends, and there’s no way of turning it off.
itsbeautiful 6y ago
Ok, just my perspective, that you dont need to share. I am typing on lenovo P51, not really a new thing, but I have two TB SSDs, 2 slots for normal ram (32gb currently), i7, no overheating, great keyboard, battery and simple possibility to just dismantle the lower part (or if needed the whole laptop) and blow all the dust out or vacuum clean it. Running linux where all the hardware (except the fingerprint reader which I would not use anyway) is supported. Once something dies I can replace it at any time on my own and the prices for replacement parts are actually going down, not up. It is "a tad" heavier but on the other side, I would carry the backpack with me regardless of weight (and now I can skip a fitness session :D). Why on earth are you even buying apple laptops? Ok, I do understand it for nontechnical people but we are on HN. I just dont understand a reasoning why you dont get yourself a proper laptop instead and all the convenience that comes with that. "Its beautiful" reason? I would imagine you actually do work on your laptop and the look is not your primary criteria when buying a work rig (although I have always loved Thinkpad boxy designs).
- temptemptemp111 6y ago
  Because most people prefer slavery. This is why the rulers treat them like cud-chewing cattle; because they act like it. Call them 'goyem' or whatever, but no need to label them when they can't stop labeling themselves. They just love the half bitten Apple logo from the tree of knowledge on their products... The BSDM-esque masks on their faces (which they virtue signal about strapping on their children for a day at a time to "go learn" at government "institutions")... Virtue signaling about how their women have to go work for another man all day in a cubicle to make grapple grommets or whatever (and now have the freedom to potentially go get killed trying to murder rice-patty farmers in a foreign land, just like their sons). Just compare the death toll from the seasonal flu to how many have killed their unborn babies sometime... So, in my estimation, the tree of knowledge did not bear the real fruit of knowing.
- Toutouxc 6y ago
  My perspective that you don't need to agree with, is that the P51 is a hideous monster that weighs exactly twice as much as my MacBook, the asymmetric keyboard + touchpad would drive me crazy, it doesn't run macOS and has worse battery life. Also my fingerprint reader works, just like every other part of the machine, along with all the software I use. There's no "except".
dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago
I just realized M1 SSDs are irrepraceable... Really, this is wrong on so many levels.
known 6y ago
https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/ssd.html https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/ssd.html can help you to fix it;
ricg 6y ago
Is there a way to get the drive SMART status without having to install 3rd party tools that run as root (or another safe way, e.g. through a VM or rolling back an APFS snapshot afterwards, etc.)? I wouldn't mind writing a bit of code either to get these stats. I have a 2020 Intel Mac Mini and an old MacBook Pro with a Samsung Evo 840.
oilbagz 6y ago
Never buy Apples' first generation .. of anything. This goes for computers, watches, phones .. cars. It has been a maxim for decades, and it holds true even today.
- Demigod33 6y ago
  iPad Pro V1 was ok, except for the smart keyboards dying. Anyone know where they can still be bought?
AHappyCamper 6y ago
So glad I read this. I was about to buy a Mac Mini M1. Now I'm holding off until this issue is clarified or solved.
TargetedVictimm 6y ago
The crypto anarchists have been trying to kill me for 3 years now. They have been gangstalking me and trying to drive me to suicide. F Elon Musk F Barry Silbert NEMESIS
hbbio 6y ago
If linked to swap issues, this article details how to disable swap (at the risk of having processes killed if you run out of RAM): https://windsketch.cc/macbook-disable-swap/ https://windsketch.cc/macbook-disable-swap/ I hope this HN thread prompts Apple teams to investigate and solve the issue.
swiley 6y ago
I really don't understand how people tolerate these massive stacks of closed software that tend to have extremely opinionated and forced automatic updates, much less pay a premium for it. If I started a company today everyone would probably get something like the system76 laptops.
aloer 6y ago
Years ago I had a 2015 MacBook Pro that used to write daily swaps in the terabyte range for about two weeks. Not a single incident but consistently 1-3 tb/day. Performance wasn’t impacted at all and so I only noticed by chance when I looked at the activity screen for other reasons It persisted through restarts and was only fixed when I reinstalled the system (and all my application software. Setup remained the same so no idea what it could’ve been) With a few assumptions about the built-in SSD I concluded that I’d be above the most likely applicable TBW within 200 days!
andy_ppp 6y ago
Built in obsolescence?
ianai 6y ago
How do I find this info? Smartctl was not found.
- Flex247A 6y ago
  On macOS: brew install smartmontools On Arch Linux: sudo pacman -Syu smartmontools
  - ianai 6y ago
    Without installing brew?
    - Flex247A 6y ago
      You need to install homebrew
john_alan 6y ago
Pagesize is now 16KB in ARM64 archs, not 4K anymore (intel). Maybe the SMART tools are miscalculating?
- megous 6y ago
  Page size is variable on aarch64. You can even have 1GiB page if you like.
  - john_alan 6y ago
    That's interesting, it seems to be 16KB on macOS implementations though.
neop1x 6y ago
Apple devices have always been lacking RAM, especially iPhones and iPads. Macbooks used to be upgradeable but now with everything soldeted on PCB that is no longer the case... so keep that in mind and buy new Macs with highest RAM option, otherwise your device may become obsolete sooner
cztomsik 6y ago
I have the cheapest one and I have much better stats, and I use it for development, pretty much compiling everything, all the time, rust, rm -rf node_modules, that kind of stuff, every day, 12-16hs for two months. Looks good. Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 10,224,513 [5.23 TB] Data Units Written: 9,526,626 [4.87 TB]
riobard 6y ago
A dumb question regarding flash programming: assume the erase block is 16MB, and there is a fresh block to write to. If I slowly append-write (not modifying existing data) to the block, would subsequent writes require the whole block to be erased/reprogrammed? The use case is usually about append-only logs: MacOS constantly generates tiny log lines and those must go somewhere? Does Write Amplification make logging a bad use case on SSD?
lostgame 6y ago
Non-removable SSD's. Just, no; never, thank you.
msie 6y ago
Why hasn't anyone looked at the source code for SMARTMonTools yet?
anfilt 6y ago
Wow the SSDs are soldered. Thats a big yikes from me. Like soldered RAM is bad enough.
jmarcher 6y ago
In (light) use since mid-Dec 2020: ``` SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 26 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 4,167,081 [2.13 TB] Data Units Written: 2,807,840 [1.43 TB] Host Read Commands: 57,601,178 Host Write Commands: 45,778,010 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 168 Power On Hours: 43 Unsafe Shutdowns: 8 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0 ```
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
stevenhubertron 6y ago
Stats for my heavily used MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018) SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 37 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 2% Data Units Read: 45,932,352 [23.5 TB] Data Units Written: 48,394,214 [24.7 TB] Host Read Commands: 1,069,241,760 Host Write Commands: 698,888,162 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 137 Power On Hours: 661 Unsafe Shutdowns: 48 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0 Now my battery health is a different story...
OngL 6y ago
I'm going to check the stat from my M1 Macs, but here is from the last MBP before 16" - 2019 15" MBP === START OF SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 32 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 2% Data Units Read: 79,321,757 [40.6 TB] Data Units Written: 63,313,296 [32.4 TB] Host Read Commands: 2,312,199,690 Host Write Commands: 1,098,534,950 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 130 Power On Hours: 1,213 Unsafe Shutdowns: 52 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0 How does this far in comparison?

691 points by voisin 6y ago

musicale 6y ago

I was worried until I noticed the words "Hard Drive" in the title.

Jonnax 6y ago
M1 Macs all have SSDs.
pier25 6y ago
Terrible title as this is actually about SSDs.
- Apocryphon 6y ago
  And the actual article says "Solid State Drive" - could be posted differently here to dodge the character count limit.
  - pier25 6y ago
    Dang probably changed the URL. The original URL did say "hard drives".
W-Stool 6y ago
Poorly worded - this problem applies to SSDs.

lainga 6y ago

The link is just a link to https://www.imore.com/m1-mac-users-report-alarming-hard-drive-health-readings https://www.imore.com/m1-mac-users-report-alarming-hard-driv...

fuzzer37 6y ago
And in turn thats just a link to LTT forms[0] what's your point? [0] https://linustechtips.com/topic/1306757-m1-mac-owners-are-experiencing-extremely-high-ssd-writes-over-short-periods-of-time-likely-thanks-to-aggressive-swap/ https://linustechtips.com/topic/1306757-m1-mac-owners-are-ex...

api 6y ago

I wonder if it's swapping a ton, especially on machines with 8G RAM? 8G is pathetic for 2021 anyway. Would never go under 16G for a serious machine.

JudasGoat 6y ago
Have to agree, I am using a Thinkpad T420 released in 2011 with 16GB. My upgrade will hopefully have a 32GB capacity.
- flatiron 6y ago
  I have 32 GB and rarely use the second 16.
  - foolmeonce 6y ago
    With 24GB, I rarely needed it all, but a good portion was cache/buffer, I.e. 10GB. Of course you can just swap to SSD and get pretty much the same performance, until you don't..
  - thitcanh 6y ago
    I have 16GB, I haven't done much today, I use Safari with 7 tabs and have Spotify and GitHub Desktop open. Memory used: 10GB Uptime: 1d I don't know, feels like OP is right. 16GB is not enough in 2021, especially since I my computer is from 2013 and already had 16GB. Unfortunately this is where Apple decided to make money, so we have brand-new 8GB $1000 devices in 2021. Thanks Apple.
intrasight 6y ago
Perhaps not a "serious machine" (that's subjective), but is well-specced for it's intended audience, and reviews are generally very positive.
imwillofficial 6y ago
So I have a MacBook with 16gb ram for work, and an M1 MacBook with 8GB Normal usage on the Intel MacBook, ~10GB, on the air with similar workload ~5GB Not apples to apples for sure, but there is some magic going on with the M1. Perhaps the different instruction set?

martini333 6y ago

150 TB of data in 2 months is hopefully not correct. Something is wrong.

Reason077 6y ago
Yeah. My 2017 MacBook Pro (256 GB Apple SSD) reports: Available Spare: 79% Available Spare Threshold: 2% Percentage Used: 15% Data Units Read: 251,550,023 [128 TB] Data Units Written: 228,761,896 [117 TB] But this is after 3.5 years of use.
- sponaugle 6y ago
  Yea, my MacBook Pro, 2018 Percentage Used: 2% Data Units Read: 84,461,830 [43.2 TB] Data Units Written: 69,369,816 [35.5 TB] Host Read Commands: 2,125,724,765 Host Write Commands: 1,440,781,009 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 117 Power On Hours: 1,253

Jonnax 6y ago

Such high swap usage sounds like a bug. But at the same time. 8GB of ram isn't a lot. Especially when multi tasking. I know there was a lot of talk about Apple's directly soldered RAM being super efficient. But if you've got 30 tabs open, playing music and using Photoshop. No amount of optimisation is going to prevent swap usage. Still though. Terrabytes of usage must be a bug.

spideymans 6y ago
Apparently the issue affects the 16 GB models as well. In that case, the SSD wear likely would not be related to the limited RAM in the 8 GB model.
- ComputerGuru 6y ago
  Presumably people getting 16GB of RAM are also running more memory intensive workloads than those not shelling out for the upgrade, so it could be a non-factor.
  - post_break 6y ago
    16GB ram M1 user, haven't seen a KB of swap since I don't do memory intensive stuff, just wanted to future proof.
Bud 6y ago
We're no longer talking about "directly soldered RAM"; in the M1 Macs, the RAM is now part of the M1 chip itself. It's on the CPU die.
- fredoralive 6y ago
  No, the RAM is separate chips / dies, albeit incorporated into the same module as the CPU. On pictures of the M1[1], the RAM is the plastic covered chips next to the main heat spreader for the SoC. [1] Such as the image on the Wikipedia article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_M1

tus89 6y ago

I wonder if they have Google Chrome installed. I recall people complaining about it chewing up measurable chunks of their SSD life a few years ago.

tomg 6y ago

How to find this on your own macOS drives: https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/135565/how-do-i-get-detailed-smart-disk-information-on-os-x-mavericks-or-later https://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/135565/how-do-i-ge...

therealmarv 6y ago

This has to be wrong readings, is the M1 swapping really totally different? My normal last gen Intel Mac has 0% usage and it's nearly one year old (yes, I use it nearly daily).

ogre_codes 6y ago
From the sounds of it, the same reading they are using to suggest the M1 will only last 1-2 years has been observed on older Macs. So this whole thing seems overblown.
abiogenesis 6y ago
It's probably macOS doing something differently when run on an M1.

gnicholas 6y ago

How does AppleCare deal with SSD issues like this? I have heard that for batteries, they'll replace if the maximum usable capacity is below 80% of what it should be. I assume they've had a similar policy for SSD? Arguably the SSD is even more critical than the battery, because you can at least hypothetically use a laptop plugged in.

randyrand 6y ago
Apple care only lasts 3 years. So pretty rare issue I imagine. new logic board.
- gnicholas 6y ago
  Yes, I imagine it has been very rare in the past. I'm wondering if anyone has come across the issue before (or has a friend who works at Apple and knows the rules). I would hope that if they give you a new logic board that they'd at least be able to transfer your data. I know that they always make you sign a waiver saying that you've backed everything up and if you lose the data that's fine. Hopefully they would at least try to transfer the data for you, if this turns out to be a bug like it sounds like.

king_magic 6y ago

It's gotta be a bug. Hopefully this will get on Apple's radar. Edit: for what it's worth, here's my stats from my 8GB M1 MacBook Air after ~2 months of continuous heavy usage as my main work machine: Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 4,622,487 [2.36 TB] Data Units Written: 2,301,067 [1.17 TB] Which feels reasonable. So doesn't seem like it affects everyone equally.

xvector 6y ago
> on Apple's radar. (For those not aware, Radar is the name of Apple’s internal bug filing system ;)
- Google234 6y ago
  I believe access is given to outsiders too
  - saagarjha 6y ago
    Only if you’re a partner of some sort, and even then your access is going to be fairly limited.
qeternity 6y ago
My 3 month old 8gb MBP Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 1% Data Units Read: 53,339,111 [27.3 TB] Data Units Written: 49,807,244 [25.5 TB]
- jghn 6y ago
  Here's mine, 8GB M1 Air with 314 power on hours Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 3% Data Units Read: 231,234,195 [118 TB] Data Units Written: 182,951,675 [93.6 TB]

floatingatoll 6y ago

The first line of the smartctl output everyone's bandying about says that a total of 1% of the drive's capacity has been used, which means that in about 16.5 years (2 months * 99 / 12) their drive will go readonly. What, exactly, is the problem with that? It seems like there are a lot of assumptions in play in this "headline news": (1) assuming that the reported numbers are valid for this measurement at all (2) that they are not a bug in the IOKit implementation used by smartctl (3) that they are not not a bug in smartctl itself (4) that they are directly comparable to non-M1 hardware without further processing (5) that they do not increment when Time Machine or other filesystem snapshots occur (6) that they do not increment when APFS copy-on-writes occur (7) that they do not include the total byte size of sparsely-modified files I don't see anyone checking these assumptions yet, but if y'all do, supporting links on those points would improve this HN post considerably. There are other assumptions that could be tested too! Outrage is cool, but science is productive.

faitswulff 6y ago
> 1% of the drive's capacity has been used, which means that in about 16.5 years (2 months * 99 / 12) their drive will go readonly. Makes me wonder if the engineers at Apple decided it was an acceptable trade off.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- Google234 6y ago
  Yes, no one uses 16 year old laptops
  - faitswulff 6y ago
    Nearly no one, I would venture to guess.
    - rovr138 6y ago
      This couch side laptop I use to read and search things is a 2011 MBA. Not 16, but maybe it'll make it...

threeseed 6y ago

From reports this isn't specific to M1 Mac users. If you're on a Mac you can run "sudo fs_usage" to see what is writing to/from your disk.

sneak 6y ago
M1 can't run pre-11.0 (Big Sur), so this might be a Big Sur issue.
skinner_ 6y ago
Thanks! I have run this command now (not on an M1 but on a 2018 MacBook Pro), and I'm reporting that 31% of my file system accesses were coming from ESET Security (namely esets_daemon, esets_proxy, ERAAgent, esets_gui), and 19% from Chrome. I'm actually using Chrome, but if ESET degrades the SSD lifespan by 31%, I'm gonna be annoyed.

qeternity 6y ago

This is completely anecdotal with nothing to back it up but it seemed like I swap far more aggressively when I have x86 processes running...not sure if this is related to Rosetta 2

whatever1 6y ago

Got my base M1 mini with 8GB of RAM and 256GB SSD on February 13th. With just simple content consumption (browser, Spotify, messaging) as of now it has written over 20TB of data! That is insane.

endless1234 6y ago
The entire drive 8 times over per day? That can't be right. With 8 hours of usage per day, that's 70 MB/s constant writing. Really?
- whatever1 6y ago
  I don’t switch it off, so that I can have remote access to It, but 20TB in 10 days sounds a lot. Also worth noting that I see my swap fluctuating from 6-8GB almost all the time (granted I have multiple browser tabs and windows, maybe like 10-30 ish ?)
gazby 6y ago
I'd be willing to bet that in looking deeper you'd find it's Spotify doing the lion's share of that.
- tandr 6y ago
  Can we ask them not to do it somehow?
  - hmage 6y ago
    Spotify was caught before (in 2016) doing exactly that -- https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/for-five-months-spotify-has-badly-abused-users-storage-drives/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/for-f... Only after publication on news sites they fixed it. Won't be surprised if the bug regressed and happened again. I don't use Spotify (not available in my country), so I wouldn't know, but I bet half of the reports are because of some badly written third party app constantly writing in 4kb chunks with O_DIRECT or fsync() all the time.

muppetman 6y ago

Can't this easily be a userspace app overwriting a logfile or something thousands of times over? Spotify is rebuilding a cache in the background every minute, or some audio editing app misuses a sqlite database and it's writing the same stuff every second etc? Any app/program can write to the disk. Why this is being framed as a hardware/OS error?

kitsunesoba 6y ago
My first thought when reading about this is that logging gone awry is a very likely cause. Could be the OS itself or apps doing it, but in either case a fix should be pretty reasonable.
- fomine3 6y ago
  I think logging can't be a problem for recent NVMe SSD (but problem for small eMMC on cars).
- bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
  Reminds me of this: https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/07/27/vmware-virtualbox-tools-impacted-by-macos-catalina-memory-leaks https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/07/27/vmware-virtualbox... > The engineer explains problem relates to a "regression in the com.apple.security.sandbox kext (or one of its related components)" in macOS 10.15.6. As part of the investigation, it was discovered com.apple.security.sandbox was allocating millions of blocks of memory containing just the text "/dev" and no other data.
tyingq 6y ago
Maybe they transitioned from an earlier MacBook and feel like they are running the same apps? Though, of course, new architecture means that's a bad assumption.
marcos100 6y ago
The problem is that the ssd is not replaceable and people are saying the main cause of this heavy writing is the swapping to disk. So a hardware/OS problem. I think it wouldn't get a lot of attention if the ssd could be replaced.

SXX 6y ago

So it's looks bad on my Macbook Air M1 16GB: Percentage Used: 3% Data Units Read: 47,004,809 [24.0 TB] Data Units Written: 47,469,528 [24.3 TB] Host Read Commands: 153,293,725 Host Write Commands: 218,787,006 It's been in-use for two months only and I haven't even compiled anythig on it and all my usage was: light gaming in few 2D games, Firefox and some films. UPD: it's 256GB SSD model.

tyingq 6y ago
How big of a drive is it? So far, most of the 3%+ used ones have 2TB drives, which is the opposite of what you would naively expect.
- bombcar 6y ago
  On my older (3+ year now) MPB 16 with a 512GB drive I get: SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 41 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 10% Percentage Used: 22% Data Units Read: 621,054,721 [317 TB] Data Units Written: 483,003,547 [247 TB] Host Read Commands: 9,028,855,382 Host Write Commands: 3,924,827,022 Controller Busy Time: 16,789 Power Cycles: 8,373 Power On Hours: 6,828 Unsafe Shutdowns: 375 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 271
  - nixgeek 6y ago
    Wow. How long ago did you get the MBP 16"? I've been running this system as my daily driver for >12 months and see very different numbers from you: smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [Darwin 20.4.0 x86_64] (local build) Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org === START OF INFORMATION SECTION === Model Number: APPLE SSD AP8192N Serial Number: XXXXXXXXXXXXX Firmware Version: 1161.100 PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID: 0x106b IEEE OUI Identifier: 0x000000 Controller ID: 0 NVMe Version: <1.2 Number of Namespaces: 1 Local Time is: Tue Feb 23 17:01:28 2021 PST Firmware Updates (0x02): 1 Slot Optional Admin Commands (0x0004): Frmw_DL Optional NVM Commands (0x0004): DS_Mngmt Maximum Data Transfer Size: 256 Pages Supported Power States St Op Max Active Idle RL RT WL WT Ent_Lat Ex_Lat 0 + 0.00W - - 0 0 0 0 0 0 === START OF SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 37 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 53,827,033 [27.5 TB] Data Units Written: 37,342,497 [19.1 TB] Host Read Commands: 704,072,000 Host Write Commands: 669,901,451 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 234 Power On Hours: 528 Unsafe Shutdowns: 74 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0

dang 6y ago

Url changed from https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/m1-mac-users-poor-ssd-health/ https://www.iphoneincanada.ca/news/m1-mac-users-poor-ssd-hea..., which points to this.

miles 6y ago

Perhaps setting the noatime flag might help? Reducing Disk IO By Mounting Partitions With noatime https://www.howtoforge.com/reducing-disk-io-by-mounting-partitions-with-noatime https://www.howtoforge.com/reducing-disk-io-by-mounting-part... OS X - Setting No-Access-Time on OS X SSD Volumes https://dpron.com/os-x-noatime-multiple-ssds/ https://dpron.com/os-x-noatime-multiple-ssds/ Optimizing MacOS X Lion for SSD http://blog.alutam.com/2012/04/01/optimizing-macos-x-lion-for-ssd/#noatime http://blog.alutam.com/2012/04/01/optimizing-macos-x-lion-fo... Mac OS X SSD tweaks https://www.icyte.com/saved/blogs.nullvision.com/441781 https://www.icyte.com/saved/blogs.nullvision.com/441781

GekkePrutser 6y ago
It'll reduce writes but it doesn't explain the huge numbers. Considering the atime updates are only ever one block.

blinkingled 6y ago

For comparison here's the nvme smart-log for my 2.5 year old X1 Carbon running Linux - used for VSCode/compiles and browsing/ssh etc. carbonx  ~  sudo nvme smart-log /dev/nvme0n1 Smart Log for NVME device:nvme0n1 namespace-id:ffffffff critical_warning : 0 temperature : 29 C available_spare : 100% available_spare_threshold : 10% percentage_used : 0% endurance group critical warning summary: 0 data_units_read : 12,862,645 data_units_written : 16,193,903 host_read_commands : 124,284,317 host_write_commands : 218,295,105 controller_busy_time : 567 power_cycles : 3,078 power_on_hours : 558 unsafe_shutdowns : 209 media_errors : 0 So around 8.2 TB written in 2.5 years of daily use. And I have had syncthing running on it past few months to sync some git repos as an experiment. (And I run a rolling release distro so lots of updates.) In comparison the M1 data posted here looks out of whack. I generally use bpftrace to find if anything keeps writing to my SSD - for the most part I don't find any misbehaving programs on modern Linux distros. Assuming dtrace still works on M1 Macs you might be able to find what is writing to the disk.

eulers_secret 6y ago
Another Linux user data point: XPS13(9310)/512GB nvme/16GB RAM/2GB swapfile/kubuntu 20.10/kernel 5.11 (in use since ~Dec 5, 2020): SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 33 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 50% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 631,319 [323 GB] Data Units Written: 1,157,883 [592 GB] Host Read Commands: 4,650,820 Host Write Commands: 7,329,774 Controller Busy Time: 16 Power Cycles: 37 Power On Hours: 45 Unsafe Shutdowns: 15 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 1 Warning Comp. Temperature Time: 0 Critical Comp. Temperature Time: 0 I do Linux kernel dev and have done quite a few kernel compiles at this point (using Ubuntu's full config) as well as general browsing and some Docker workloads and Spotify... Judging by 'Power On Hours' combined with 'Data Units Written', looks like there's a bug to me. As a side, I don't know why 'Available Spare Threshold' is 50%, and the 1 'Error Information Log Entries' appears to be successful results of some test.

throwaway888abc 6y ago

Youtube is/was disk killer for some reason. Used to listen a lot of music from it, but the constant heavy disk usage put me off. 16GB on Linux, zero swapping, Chrome browser. Switched to old school MP3 playing via Audacity and never looked back. You can see what is wearing your disk under process / activity manager. The M1 behaviour can it be Chrome + Youtube,Netflix,Spotify usage related? 2c

0xfacfac 6y ago

Nice, LTT made it to the #1 of HN. :clap:

alphabettsy 6y ago

Maybe there’s a common application at fault here?

hayksaakian 6y ago

MacBook Pro (13-inch, 2020, Four Thunderbolt 3 ports) (1 year old) Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 23,095,006 [11.8 TB] Data Units Written: 22,728,206 [11.6 TB] Host Read Commands: 436,520,152 Host Write Commands: 414,121,166

mugivarra69 6y ago

that is most likely due to swapping .

SirensOfTitan 6y ago

14TB written on my 4 week old m1 mbp with 256 GB. Ridiculous.

m000 6y ago

Yeah, it's a bug. But don't go crazy over it. Back in 2016, a Spotify bug resulted in writes of approximately 700GB/day [1]. No SSD died, judging from the lack of a class action lawsuit. And at least for my MBP SSD, I can tell you it is still doing very much alright, despite being thrashed for anywhere between a few weeks to a few months. Having said that, do apply any temporary fix. Even if the effect will probably be negligible, it's still unnecessary wear. [1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/239268-spotify-may-killing-ssd https://www.extremetech.com/computing/239268-spotify-may-kil...

salusinarduis 6y ago

I had this exact issue and had to disable SIP to disable swap because I was swapping over 2TB a day. Everyone I chatted to online about it jumped over themselves to tell me I was an idiot, and I somehow needed to swap even though I have 16gb ram. Needless to say I'm having a little chuckle. It's a lesson for us all about blindly believing things.

webmobdev 6y ago
Did you notice any performance hit after disabling swap? Even 16 Gb RAM doesn't seem enough ...
- salusinarduis 6y ago
  Not a thing, though I didn't benchmark! Only stupid thing is you can't run iOS apps while SIP is disabled, and re-enabling SIP turns swap back on. iOS apps aren't something I care about so it doesn't really affect me.

ngvrnd 6y ago

What tools are you using to measure this?

outside1234 6y ago

2.5 year old 32GB RAM Macbook Pro on Intel for contrast (developer workload over that timeframe): Percentage Used: 4% Data Units Read: 151,520,338 [77.5 TB] Data Units Written: 102,518,209 [52.4 TB] Host Read Commands: 3,014,199,390 Host Write Commands: 2,371,675,100

johncalvinyoung 6y ago
3.2 year old 16GB MBP w/ 1TB on Intel (heavy developer workload): Percentage Used: 5% Data Units Read: 498,780,988 [255 TB] Data Units Written: 265,225,887 [135 TB] Host Read Commands: 6,633,264,962 Host Write Commands: 2,911,463,422

Huwyt_Nashi022 6y ago

I blame the blacks.

blkhp19 6y ago

Www

whichdan 6y ago

Baseline M1 MBA, about 1 month of regular usage Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 9,670,166 [4.95 TB] Data Units Written: 6,898,714 [3.53 TB] Host Read Commands: 75,916,955 Host Write Commands: 41,914,954 Power Cycles: 80 Fwiw, my swap tends to hover around 2.5-3gb lately

sigjuice 6y ago

I hope this doesn't get "fixed" in the next update by making it impossible to run smartctl.

webmobdev 6y ago
I was going to comment, "That's a stupid thing to say" but then realised who we are talking about ...

tbrock 6y ago

This is total trash, I've had my M1 MacBook Air for >2 months and it shows 0% used. I've got the 512GB SSD / 16GB ram model. I'm using it HARD for 12 hours a day so YMMV...

macawfish 6y ago

For such small drives, why can't they just splurge a little and put some high endurance SSDs in?

tzs 6y ago

For comparison, my 2017 iMac with 1 TB SSD gives: Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 10% Percentage Used: 1% Data Units Read: 109,446,813 [56.0 TB] Data Units Written: 68,569,966 [35.1 TB] Host Read Commands: 2,922,206,492 Host Write Commands: 2,180,242,949 Controller Busy Time: 4,463 Power Cycles: 13,345 This is after 40 months, during which it has been my main computer for both home and work. So about 10.5 TB of writes per year. Prior to the iMac I had a 2008 Mac Pro for work and a 2009 Mac Pro for home. Those were doing about 7.8 TB per year of writes combined, but that includes an SSD on the home one that was used for Time Machine. Subtracting out that, it was about 5.2 TB per year combined writes, so about half of what I do on the iMac.

ksec 6y ago

On the Subject of Swap and SSD write I have previously reported many issues to Apple over the years. Earliest report going back to 2016. And of course heard no feedback as usual. You may want to check Activity Monitor > Disk > Kernel_Task for Disk Write. This shows how much swaps write, along with other apps you have been using since your last reboot. You can check your last reboot time in System Information > Software. Currently Launchd wrote 50GB which I have no idea why. Corespotlightd wrote 70GB. And SafariBookMarkagent with 4GB. And Kernel_Task 4.5TB. These numbers are over the course of 30 days. Generally speaking Mac has been very Swap heavy for a long time. And Big Sur seems to be pushing this further as there are evidence shown this isn't seems to be specific to M1. On Safari, if you have lots of Tabs, Clicking Tab Overview will force all Tabs to Reload. Which will write hundreds of GB of Data if you have lots of Tab, especially if they were originally sitting idle. ( i.e You close Safari and you reopen it where Tabs not focused are not loaded ). If you have iCloud Drive, there may be some cases where you are downloading few hundreds GB of iCloud Data a day if you have certain Apps that constantly update its files. WhatsApp Backup used to ( and may still be the case ) cause this problem if you have a large WhatsApp History. WhatsApp download a 50GB copy, only to realise it has a new copy on iCloud and re-download again. Doing it many times per day. Assuming some tweaked options, iCloud could be downloading all of your iPhone / iPad Backup to your Mac as cache. Again, if you have 100GB of Backup and that is downloaded once or twice per day. It adds up. Disabling iCloud Drive tends to help. Last time we had Electron Apps, or specifically Spotify making hundreds of GB per write per day due to a bug. But as usual, Apple apologist around the world are quick to point out these are non-issues. Luckily HN still have some sanity. Hopefully this is finally enough to finally push Apple to fix it. Windows or Linux doesn't have the same write data count even when the usage pattern are roughly the same.

rvz 6y ago
Best part is that the SSD is soldered into the board and it can't be replaced. Even worse. In this case for the M1 Macs when the SSD dies, the Mac becomes bricked and if you have no backups then the data on the dead SSD is lost. A typical web dev may rely on running a couple of electron apps, docker, IntelliJ and lots of chrome tabs to get their work done. Alongside everyday use looks to me that the life of this SSD is going to be shortened very quickly. I already said this before [0] and it seems to them 'it is not an issue.' Well here we are and this thread is full of other concerned users. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26150405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26150405

kelchm 6y ago

Just to add some more data here, M1 MBA 16GB Ram / 256GB SSD which I've been using for almost exactly two months: SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 34 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 5,315,871 [2.72 TB] Data Units Written: 2,249,290 [1.15 TB]

SXX 6y ago
What is your most used software? Are you using Firefox or Chrome?
- kelchm 6y ago
  This is my personal machine, so primarily using it nights/weekends for thinking with embedded development projects and web browsing lately. I was using Firefox, but have recently switched Safari full time. It just seems to run better and isn't as brutal on the battery.
  - SXX 6y ago
    Thanks. So far it actually looks like Firefox is somewhat heavy on writes.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

and0rskr 6y ago

My Macbook M1 Air (6 days old) Available Spare: 100%. Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 4,645,245 [2.37 TB] Data Units Written: 4,045,006 [2.07 TB] Host Read Commands: 30,123,041 Host Write Commands: 17,403,647 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 85 Power On Hours: 18

Beefin 6y ago

These SSDs are going to be dropping like flies unless Apple produces a firmware update soon... has Apple responded?

SilverRed 6y ago
The real problem here is that the M1 macbooks do not have a replaceable SSD. Even without this issue, SSDs do die sometimes and on every non Apple laptop you just buy a new m.2 sdd and everything is all good. I have had macbook SSDs die in the past and thanks to it being a swappable module back then, it was no big deal.
- rvz 6y ago
  > The real problem here is that the M1 macbooks do not have a replaceable SSD. Even without this issue, SSDs do die sometimes and on every non Apple laptop you just buy a new m.2 sdd and everything is all good. In the past, when the SSD dies on these older Macbooks, you just replace the SSD with a new one. Very important for long term use when it eventually goes out of warranty, since there would be no need to go to the Apple Store to get it replaced for a fee. On the M1 Macbooks, thats it. It's bricked and your data is lost and no way to recover it. (If you didn't backup in advance) You might as well buy another one. In my case, I will continue to use my old Macbook and wait until Apple fixes the excessive writes or swapping issues in a newer version of macOS. By then I would be getting a Macbook with a newer M1X or M2 processor that doesn't have the excessive swapping issues and the software ecosystem for Apple Silicon would already have caught up with it and will be optimised for the processor. I said it before with Apple products [0] [1] [2] [3], I always ignore the first generation unless you want to be a bleeding edge beta tester trying to get work done or you're after collector editions. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25066248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25066248 [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23638202 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22852633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22852633 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22300515 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22300515

MR4D 6y ago

My gut feeling is that this is an error of the reporting tool - or perhaps more specifically, an interpretation of the results. I think it is highly likely that these accesses are hitting some sort of cache (possibly page files, or SRAM, etc), not actually hitting the actual TLC/QLC part of the storage. Obviously I could be wrong, but I’d be surprised if Apple made this big of a mistake and didn’t catch it internally before now. If they did, then there are some serious quality issues in their process.

__warlord__ 6y ago

I guess Apple will disable these statistics for users similar to what they did with the "battery remaining time" back in the day (not that long ago :P). Written this from a mac mini m1 8Gb,256Gb

knz_ 6y ago

This looks overtly malicious. There's really no excuse for people to be seeing over 30TB of writes to their drives if they only use their system for browsing the web or dev work. My main NVMe drive's stats, after almost a year of ownership, after 3 OS installs (windows and linux, though I moved windows to a smaller less used sata ssd a few months ago) and frequently moving big files on/off network storage, installing games, and dev work for small personal projects etc: Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 10% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 200,214,119 [102 TB] Data Units Written: 27,304,663 [13.9 TB] Host Read Commands: 616,298,176 Host Write Commands: 387,970,043

risyachka 6y ago
It is just a bug that will be fixed. Literally happens with all kinds of systems and software. In case some SSDs already have big damage - will probably be replaced for free as usual.

new_realist 6y ago

M1 hardware can obviously swap to SSD without involving the OS much, and not at all on the prefetch/swapin path. That’s impressive.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

pid_0 6y ago

Why am I surprised this is posted on LTT? He and his fans are so anti-apple its nauseating.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

Beefin 6y ago

1 week old M1: SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 25 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 933,459 [477 GB] Data Units Written: 670,152 [343 GB] Host Read Commands: 15,779,474 Host Write Commands: 7,614,634 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 78 Power On Hours: 6 Unsafe Shutdowns: 3 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0

gabriel-uribe 6y ago

M1 MBA 8/256 after ~2 months: Percentage Used: 6% Data Units Read: 163,709,197 [83.8 TB] Data Units Written: 180,048,189 [92.1 TB] Host Read Commands: 2,225,703,049 Host Write Commands: 1,729,134,696

lovelyviking 6y ago

macOS: How to Disable Homebrew Analytics In case you are not aware or do not want to send homebrew analytics here is how to turn it off: brew analytics off "According to their GitHub page, Homebrew’s anonymous user and event data have a 14 month retention period, which is the lowest possible for Google Analytics." https://www.macobserver.com/tips/quick-tip/disable-homebrew-analytics/ https://www.macobserver.com/tips/quick-tip/disable-homebrew-...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

ya1sec 6y ago

My 256GB SSD/8GB MBA, approaching three months: Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 5,170,416 [2.64 TB] Data Units Written: 2,977,938 [1.52 TB] Host Read Commands: 89,184,979 Host Write Commands: 34,892,977 Mostly being used for building web apps, somewhat heavy video editing loads, and messing around in python. Using a lot of different software, much of it (entire Adobe Suite) via rosetta. I'm not sure what to make of these stats yet. > Maybe we should consider listing which OS version everyone is using? I never updated from 11.0.1 and these stats seem comparatively low. Latest Big Sur is 11.2.1.

nknealk 6y ago

M1 air used mostly for VSCode and web browsing. I regularly see swap in the 1-3 GB range. I think I have < 100 hours of usage. SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 31 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 8,236,219 [4.21 TB] Data Units Written: 6,393,656 [3.27 TB] Host Read Commands: 86,536,748 Host Write Commands: 37,609,250

spear 6y ago

Why is "Available Spare Threshold" showing as 99% on these M1 SSDs? I believe normal SSDs are more on the order of 10%.

teterphiel 6y ago

Haven't seen this mentioned: I wake up to a double digit GB Finder process every other day. I leave it plugged in during the night. Wear is 3% or 48TB of writes.

hmage 6y ago
What finder extensions you have enabled? Disable them all, see if behaviour stays.
- teterphiel 6y ago
  I don't have any as far as I can tell, but some 3rd party tool that interacts with Finder in some way could be the culprit..

malthaus 6y ago

crazy, day one m1 8gb ram with 512gb hd here. this laptop has never seen spotify and safari is my main browser - no compilation or other heavy ram use either. Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 44,414,705 [22.7 TB] Data Units Written: 38,739,583 [19.8 TB] Host Read Commands: 769,910,444 Host Write Commands: 421,693,825

culopatin 6y ago
Day one as in bought on release day or that you’ve had it for one day?

erwinh 6y ago

How do you get this print out of the disk usage?

vanpythonista 6y ago
You can use: brew install smartmontools && smartctl --all /dev/disk0 to get this data

jbverschoor 6y ago

14TB in 2 months here (1TB/16GB)

dougifresh94 6y ago

I've created a Google form to collect some data - https://forms.gle/ksV68PicxdPvgjzt8 https://forms.gle/ksV68PicxdPvgjzt8 Feel free to help crowdsource some data on the issue.

arrty88 6y ago

I purchased my M1 on Feb 16... haven't used her all that much since i have a 16" Pro for work. Does this look bad? Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 5,406,703 [2.76 TB] Data Units Written: 5,381,633 [2.75 TB] Host Read Commands: 27,309,330 Host Write Commands: 25,822,612

hmage 6y ago

Intel iMac I bought in november 2020 (~3 months of use) with 128GB of RAM, so it never swaps: SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 42 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 95,824,868 [49.0 TB] Data Units Written: 89,046,642 [45.5 TB] Host Read Commands: 1,365,215,816 Host Write Commands: 837,815,676 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 145 Power On Hours: 604 Looking at iosnoop I see dropbox, google drive, backbalze, arq and other programs heavily abusing my SSD with tons of small (4kb) writes. With age of 105 days, that's 433 GB/day. My SSD's block size is 45.5TB/89046642 which is ~512kb. 433 GB/day divided by blocksize is 9.8 hertz, meaning I've had apps write ~10 times per second on average. This corresponds with what I'm seeing at iosnoop. Tons of third party apps open files with O_DIRECT flag or call fsync() right after each write. SQLite databases are most common culprit, since by default it flushes to disk every small insert/replace. And every sqlite database I've seen by third party app just uses defaults (none of them are using WAL, for example). OS has to flush that to disk if O_DIRECT or fsync() is used, therefore leading to write amplification. https://www.sqlite.org/atomiccommit.html https://www.sqlite.org/atomiccommit.html -- Each insert gets into journal first, that's 4kb there, then index gets updated, that's another 4kb, and then it gets committed to main database, that's another 4kb. There might be more, but in what I'm observing in iosnoop it's coming as multiple of 3. And since I'm on 512kb SSD blocks, that's 1.5MB per single insert/update. I forced every sqlite database on my disk to be WAL and changed synchronous to NORMAL from default (FULL), and it reduced I/O activity greatly without any ill side effects in months, most likely developers of these apps aren't even aware of these tunables: https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_journal_mode https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_journal_mode https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_synchronous https://www.sqlite.org/pragma.html#pragma_synchronous

perryh2 6y ago
How did you change every sqlite db running on your system?
- 6y ago

buckeye1941 6y ago

Many iOS apps use Realm DB which is memory mapped and calls fsync on every write. This wasn’t obvious to iPhone/iPad users but will wear out SSDs very quickly.

dpacmittal 6y ago

14 month old Dell Inspiron with 512GB nvme: SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 30 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 50% Percentage Used: 4% Data Units Read: 7,993,097 [4.09 TB] Data Units Written: 10,644,620 [5.45 TB] Host Read Commands: 93,990,757 Host Write Commands: 215,449,508 Controller Busy Time: 1,499 Power Cycles: 107 Power On Hours: 8,203 Unsafe Shutdowns: 21 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0 Warning Comp. Temperature Time: 0 Critical Comp. Temperature Time: 0 Temperature Sensor 1: 30 Celsius Thermal Temp. 1 Transition Count: 85 Thermal Temp. 2 Transition Count: 74 Thermal Temp. 1 Total Time: 340 Thermal Temp. 2 Total Time: 122

culopatin 6y ago
Hackintosh?

neilv 6y ago

The post alleges that this this is due to "aggressive swap". I suspect that the MacOS developers at Apple know their target hardware, so I'm wondering (if this is the situation) whether the developers realized it, but the product was shipped anyway. FWIW, even as a developer who mostly stays out of the kernel, swap has long been on my mind for Linux laptops (e.g., keeping pre-SSD spinning-rust hard drives sleeping), and I pretty much always disable swap, even on desktops. Part of the rationale is, if I can't fit all the processes in (now) several gigabytes of RAM, something probably needs an OOM-euthanizing.

eru 6y ago
Swap is most useful, when you (almost) never look at the swapped out data again. That might sound stupid, but it occurs often enough in practice: eg code or data structures that were only used when starting off the program in question. An optimally coded program wouldn't benefit from this. But real world programs often do.
- mytherin 6y ago
  I wouldn't link the usefulness of swap to the quality of programs. It has a lot to do with user behavior. If a user opens 100 tabs in a web browser but never looks at most of them, swapping unused ones to disk if they don't fit in RAM anymore is a very useful behavior (considering the alternative is killing the entire program). You could argue an optimally coded program should do this themselves, however, that is not so easy when multiple programs are running concurrently and fighting for RAM. On an 8GB machine, how much RAM should your web browser use? The answer is "it depends". If there are no other programs running, it can use all 8GB. If you are running an IDE, a chat client and a compiler in the background, it should probably be using less. The individual programs don't have enough information to make this judgement call - and making very conservative estimates will lead to much more swapping than actually required. The operating system is in charge of allocating memory for all those programs and can effectively make the judgement of what should be swapped out or not.
- xxs 6y ago
  If you hit the swap, there is no disk cache. Which is problematic on its right own.

dluong 6y ago

M1 MBA 8GB/256GB, mostly safari with ~20 tabs avg and youtube, no spotify Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 25,160,936 [12.8 TB] Data Units Written: 23,041,292 [11.7 TB] Host Read Commands: 207,408,853 Host Write Commands: 98,285,538 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 173 Power On Hours: 101

newbie578 6y ago

Has Apple responded? This is not a small issue..

flyinghamster 6y ago

And this is Exhibit A on why I don't want any computer I spend a lot of money on to have a non-replaceable SSD. Inevitably, it will turn into a brick, or at least a poor excuse for a laptop that only runs off external drives.

illustriousbear 6y ago

M1 macbook, 512gb hdd here. Anyone mind sharing their total "real" space. Mine is 494.38gb Thanks!

hn_is_great 6y ago

Why are people expecting apple to deliver high performance hardware? A macbook is an incredibly well designed (visually not technically) browser in a very slick aluminium case: if you expect more from it you will of course be disappointed. Am I the only person who thinks this??

alblue 6y ago

Over yet last few years the WiFi daemon insists in writing content to the /var/log/wifi.log and friends, and there’s no way of turning it off.

itsbeautiful 6y ago

Ok, just my perspective, that you dont need to share. I am typing on lenovo P51, not really a new thing, but I have two TB SSDs, 2 slots for normal ram (32gb currently), i7, no overheating, great keyboard, battery and simple possibility to just dismantle the lower part (or if needed the whole laptop) and blow all the dust out or vacuum clean it. Running linux where all the hardware (except the fingerprint reader which I would not use anyway) is supported. Once something dies I can replace it at any time on my own and the prices for replacement parts are actually going down, not up. It is "a tad" heavier but on the other side, I would carry the backpack with me regardless of weight (and now I can skip a fitness session :D). Why on earth are you even buying apple laptops? Ok, I do understand it for nontechnical people but we are on HN. I just dont understand a reasoning why you dont get yourself a proper laptop instead and all the convenience that comes with that. "Its beautiful" reason? I would imagine you actually do work on your laptop and the look is not your primary criteria when buying a work rig (although I have always loved Thinkpad boxy designs).

temptemptemp111 6y ago
Because most people prefer slavery. This is why the rulers treat them like cud-chewing cattle; because they act like it. Call them 'goyem' or whatever, but no need to label them when they can't stop labeling themselves. They just love the half bitten Apple logo from the tree of knowledge on their products... The BSDM-esque masks on their faces (which they virtue signal about strapping on their children for a day at a time to "go learn" at government "institutions")... Virtue signaling about how their women have to go work for another man all day in a cubicle to make grapple grommets or whatever (and now have the freedom to potentially go get killed trying to murder rice-patty farmers in a foreign land, just like their sons). Just compare the death toll from the seasonal flu to how many have killed their unborn babies sometime... So, in my estimation, the tree of knowledge did not bear the real fruit of knowing.
Toutouxc 6y ago
My perspective that you don't need to agree with, is that the P51 is a hideous monster that weighs exactly twice as much as my MacBook, the asymmetric keyboard + touchpad would drive me crazy, it doesn't run macOS and has worse battery life. Also my fingerprint reader works, just like every other part of the machine, along with all the software I use. There's no "except".

dvfjsdhgfv 6y ago

I just realized M1 SSDs are irrepraceable... Really, this is wrong on so many levels.

known 6y ago

https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/ssd.html https://easylinuxtipsproject.blogspot.com/p/ssd.html can help you to fix it;

ricg 6y ago

Is there a way to get the drive SMART status without having to install 3rd party tools that run as root (or another safe way, e.g. through a VM or rolling back an APFS snapshot afterwards, etc.)? I wouldn't mind writing a bit of code either to get these stats. I have a 2020 Intel Mac Mini and an old MacBook Pro with a Samsung Evo 840.

oilbagz 6y ago

Never buy Apples' first generation .. of anything. This goes for computers, watches, phones .. cars. It has been a maxim for decades, and it holds true even today.

Demigod33 6y ago
iPad Pro V1 was ok, except for the smart keyboards dying. Anyone know where they can still be bought?

AHappyCamper 6y ago

So glad I read this. I was about to buy a Mac Mini M1. Now I'm holding off until this issue is clarified or solved.

TargetedVictimm 6y ago

The crypto anarchists have been trying to kill me for 3 years now. They have been gangstalking me and trying to drive me to suicide. F Elon Musk F Barry Silbert NEMESIS

hbbio 6y ago

If linked to swap issues, this article details how to disable swap (at the risk of having processes killed if you run out of RAM): https://windsketch.cc/macbook-disable-swap/ https://windsketch.cc/macbook-disable-swap/ I hope this HN thread prompts Apple teams to investigate and solve the issue.

swiley 6y ago

I really don't understand how people tolerate these massive stacks of closed software that tend to have extremely opinionated and forced automatic updates, much less pay a premium for it. If I started a company today everyone would probably get something like the system76 laptops.

aloer 6y ago

Years ago I had a 2015 MacBook Pro that used to write daily swaps in the terabyte range for about two weeks. Not a single incident but consistently 1-3 tb/day. Performance wasn’t impacted at all and so I only noticed by chance when I looked at the activity screen for other reasons It persisted through restarts and was only fixed when I reinstalled the system (and all my application software. Setup remained the same so no idea what it could’ve been) With a few assumptions about the built-in SSD I concluded that I’d be above the most likely applicable TBW within 200 days!

andy_ppp 6y ago

Built in obsolescence?

ianai 6y ago

How do I find this info? Smartctl was not found.

Flex247A 6y ago
On macOS: brew install smartmontools On Arch Linux: sudo pacman -Syu smartmontools
- ianai 6y ago
  Without installing brew?
  - Flex247A 6y ago
    You need to install homebrew

john_alan 6y ago

Pagesize is now 16KB in ARM64 archs, not 4K anymore (intel). Maybe the SMART tools are miscalculating?

megous 6y ago
Page size is variable on aarch64. You can even have 1GiB page if you like.
- john_alan 6y ago
  That's interesting, it seems to be 16KB on macOS implementations though.

neop1x 6y ago

Apple devices have always been lacking RAM, especially iPhones and iPads. Macbooks used to be upgradeable but now with everything soldeted on PCB that is no longer the case... so keep that in mind and buy new Macs with highest RAM option, otherwise your device may become obsolete sooner

cztomsik 6y ago

I have the cheapest one and I have much better stats, and I use it for development, pretty much compiling everything, all the time, rust, rm -rf node_modules, that kind of stuff, every day, 12-16hs for two months. Looks good. Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 10,224,513 [5.23 TB] Data Units Written: 9,526,626 [4.87 TB]

riobard 6y ago

A dumb question regarding flash programming: assume the erase block is 16MB, and there is a fresh block to write to. If I slowly append-write (not modifying existing data) to the block, would subsequent writes require the whole block to be erased/reprogrammed? The use case is usually about append-only logs: MacOS constantly generates tiny log lines and those must go somewhere? Does Write Amplification make logging a bad use case on SSD?

lostgame 6y ago

Non-removable SSD's. Just, no; never, thank you.

msie 6y ago

Why hasn't anyone looked at the source code for SMARTMonTools yet?

anfilt 6y ago

Wow the SSDs are soldered. Thats a big yikes from me. Like soldered RAM is bad enough.

jmarcher 6y ago

In (light) use since mid-Dec 2020: ``` SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 26 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 4,167,081 [2.13 TB] Data Units Written: 2,807,840 [1.43 TB] Host Read Commands: 57,601,178 Host Write Commands: 45,778,010 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 168 Power On Hours: 43 Unsafe Shutdowns: 8 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0 ```

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

stevenhubertron 6y ago

Stats for my heavily used MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2018) SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 37 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 2% Data Units Read: 45,932,352 [23.5 TB] Data Units Written: 48,394,214 [24.7 TB] Host Read Commands: 1,069,241,760 Host Write Commands: 698,888,162 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 137 Power On Hours: 661 Unsafe Shutdowns: 48 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0 Now my battery health is a different story...

OngL 6y ago

I'm going to check the stat from my M1 Macs, but here is from the last MBP before 16" - 2019 15" MBP === START OF SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 32 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 2% Data Units Read: 79,321,757 [40.6 TB] Data Units Written: 63,313,296 [32.4 TB] Host Read Commands: 2,312,199,690 Host Write Commands: 1,098,534,950 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 130 Power On Hours: 1,213 Unsafe Shutdowns: 52 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0 How does this far in comparison?