17 ms·
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 ye
by 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 agoYes, no one uses 16 year old laptops
- faitswulff 6y agoNearly no one, I would venture to guess.
- rovr138 6y agoThis couch side laptop I use to read and search things is a 2011 MBA. Not 16, but maybe it'll make it...
- s0rce 6y agoMy 2011 MBA from grad school is pretty much done, its so slow. I replaced the battery and the charging port and its doing better but still about to end. Good 10 years though.
- rovr138 6y agoYeah, after posting I was thinking about that. I have a very lean setup on it with Linux. I don't think it'll last too much longer to be honest. I mainly use it if I'm on my phone, but find something that a bigger screen/keyboard would help. But I can't do much on it. Even a RPi has more RAM on it.
- _jal 6y agoI have an Iphone 4 that still serves as a remote control for my music setup. The battery was replaced once, 2014 or so.
- m4rtink 6y agoWell, maybe using 16 years old machine today - but what about using current machine in 16 years ? A lot of stuff has stabilized and has been "good enough" for many use cases for quite a while.
- wmf 6y agoSoftware support is less than 10 years so in 16 years you'd be very far behind on security patches.
- m4rtink 6y agoWell, on Mac and other proprietary hardware & software combos. Enterprise Linux distros such as RHEL regularly provide 10-12 years of support you can pay for per major version and presumably you will be able to upgrade the major version to reset the time. Same thing for community Linux distros - Fedora, Debian of OpenSUSE already work on current 16+ years old hardware and one can expect that to continue in the future.
- dukeofdoom 6y agoI still use my apple 16GB ipod touch to play music, its in a speaker that has a dock for it. Still works, and I use it to play music. The hardware works. But almost none of the software works, except the music player. The browser no longer works, otherwise I would play music off of spotify or youtube. That thing is probably 13 years old now.
- culopatin 6y agoGood for you. Do you use a 16yo laptop though? Because that is the topic here.
- Hiopl 6y agoPerformance improvements have slowed a great deal since then. Assuming you aren't doing anything particularly heavy, you can easily get away with using a Sandy Bridge CPU (10 years old) for most tasks. You'll likely still be able to use it in 5 years just fine. That applies even moreso for something as performant and efficient as the M1. Case in point, my ThinkPad T420 has been in use since 2011. Even though it's no longer my main driver, the performance is more than good enough for when I need a backup device. For comparison, 16 years ago, we're talking about single-core 32-bit CPUs, the very first version of their Centrino brand, DDR2 RAM and IDE/PATA HDDs. There's just not much you can do with those limitations.
- auggierose 6y agoThe performance improvements due to parallel computing hardware (think Metal GPUs and their successors) will be so insane in 16 years that your current laptop won't stand a chance at doing anything what will be considered standard then.
- lmm 6y agoIncreasing parallelism is irrelevant for most workloads due to Amdahl's law.
- adrr 6y agoStill use my 2010 MBP 15”. I changed out the battery twice and swapped in a SSD drive. It’s my only dvd drive. I also have a 2011 Air 11” that still works.
- dsabanin 6y agoEspecially 1st gen of new platform laptops, with all the potential quirks. I think that's also why Apple priced them very affordably.
- biztos 6y agoMy 2006 white plastic MacBook is still in use. It's just a friend's kid's video player right now, because with OSX it's become too slow for most uses, but if someone put Linux or BSD on it....
- pwdisswordfish6 6y agoThat’s right. I use an 18-year-old laptop.
- tyingq 6y agoThe first two in here[1] are reporting 3% of a 2TB drive in a couple months. And speculating what that would look like for a 256GB drive. So, not definitive, but if it does mean 24% in two months for a smaller drive, that's not great. [1] 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... Edit: I suppose it makes sense that the people seeing lots of wear are the 2TB drive buyers. People that are willing to pay for that much NVME probably use it a lot.
- floatingatoll 6y agoIf there’s no data available about 256GB models, then there’s no way to assess whether their speculations are valid. I look forward to more data. My 1TB NVMe drive in my Intel mac desktop is at 1% after 18 months, and shows some 46TB of writes by their data collection method. At least 600GB of the data is music albums that haven’t changed since I first copied it over, and I’m mildly curious whether it’s truly writing 32GB/day for 18 months (since I never run out of RAM and I don’t do large I/O activities). But they’re all focused on M1 so I’m staying out of it and letting them do so.
- diego 6y agoI have a 256GB, bought it exactly two months ago. 55TB written, 3%. Not doing anything crazy with it, it's mostly a Chrome machine.
- ddoeth 6y ago55TB written in 2 months for a chrome machine is insane. My 2016 MBP has 55 TB written in those almost 5 years.
- runeks 6y agoMy three months old 256 GB shows 9 TB written and 0% used. I mainly write in VS Code on this machine.
- rb2k_ 6y agoAgreed. I've seen thousands of mac minis in CI farms writing 1+ TB / day (all day, every day) and they're slowly starting to die 4 years in. It's hard to write flash to death with that kind of write load. I wouldn't worry about that.
- ianai 6y agoAre there any numbers with precision below one digit? If not, 1% could mean a lot of things and muddle any takeaways to nil.
- mhh__ 6y agoYou are also assuming it's linear, no?
- rovr138 6y agoWe are also assuming it'll grow at all. The premise of the comment is that we don't have enough data.
- rodgerd 6y ago> What, exactly, is the problem with that? Literally the entire thread appears to be "people who can't do maths correctly, misinterpreting a third-party tool which may or may not be accurately reporting the information in the first place, running around like their hair is on fire."
- blep-arsh 6y agoApple's own Activity Monitor shows hundreds of GBs of disk writes per hour on my M1 Macbook Pro. Smartctl output showing 10+ terabytes of writes per month looks about right. Apple doesn't provide lifetime TBW numbers but e.g. Samsung seems to only cover about 150-250 terabytes written total for various 250GB SSD models.
- rodgerd 6y agoGo have a look at the linked thread, where people are basic their hysteria on three order of magnitude errors.
- SXX 6y agoJust in case I all for science and now gonna try to debug what processes cause heavy writes to disk. Easier for me because I don't really use much except browser and some games. > 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. Problem is that my SSD end up 3% dead two months after I bought M1 and after month of daily browsing / Netflix. So that news got me really worried about what gonna happen if I actually move my files to that laptop, connect it to DropBox and and gonna compile C++ on it and might be do some Java web development. What if I end up with 5% capacity loss a month?
- sys_64738 6y agoSorry that I don't know much about SSDs but what do you mean by "their drive will go readonly"? Can you elaborate? Thanks.
- lisper 6y agoSSDs have a limited number of total write cycles they can undergo before they wear out. See e.g.: https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000137999/hard-drive-why-do-solid-state-devices-ssd-wear-out https://www.dell.com/support/kbdoc/en-us/000137999/hard-driv...
- NegativeLatency 6y agoDecent explanation here: https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/210492-extremetech-explains-how-do-ssds-work https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/210492-extremetech-expla...
- Filligree 6y agoIn addition to what's been said, Flash cells lose data over time and need to be rewritten. The controllers take care of this. But an SSD that has gone read-only, assuming it can in fact go read-only, is an SSD that will quickly lose all its data.
- scottlamb 6y agoIt also seems to me there are a couple jumps in the initial tweets here (particularly the assumption of the same write rate on 256 GiB models as on 2 TiB models). But regarding several of the assumptions you mentioned here: > (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 smartmonctl is a tool that inspects the drive's built-in statistics about physical writes. If it shows significant jumps from snapshots, copy-on-write, and sparse files, it's because those feature aren't working as designed in minimizing physical writes. I also find it unlikely that a bug in smartmonctl or IOKit would show incorrect but plausible-looking values. More likely in the SSD's firmware. But I'm not getting alarmed just yet. (I also don't own an M1 Mac, so that's easy for me to say.)
- fingerlocks 6y agoMy 2017 MBP is showing 97% capacity. It's my daily driver. So at this rate I can expect the SSD to last 291 years? Really? Either these numbers are bogus, or the capacity drop over time is far from linear.
- wmf 6y agoThat's just the wear capacity; an SSD can still suffer random failures at any time. The controller and DRAM aren't designed to last for decades.
- rasz 6y ago>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) And cellphone reception bars accurately tell you signal strength on Apple product https://mspoweruser.com/apple-admits-to-the-iphone-lying-for-years-about-signal-reception/ https://mspoweruser.com/apple-admits-to-the-iphone-lying-for... What really matters is the number of write cycles drive performed, not some imaginary dumbed down single number "Percentage Used" indicator. > their drive will go readonly. Cn you point me to a drive manufacturer/model which reliably goes into READ ONLY mode after encountering a defect/exceeding wear limit? Hint: Even most expensive Intel server drives will silently die on you despite claiming read only fallback.
- Bancakes 6y agoOr the trillion dollar proprietor of the software can disprove these claims and escape defamation. Why don't you take the first step in the assumptions you pointed out because nobody seems to be interested in damage control.
- willyt 6y agoI read this article and immediately tried it on my own 2014 MacBook out of curiosity. Turns out its a third party command line tool that doesn't come with macOS that's reporting statistics on a proprietary system on chip SSD that has only been available for 2-3 months. This thing is probably not using an off the shelf SSD controller and the chances are the information is just wrong. Some of the stats reported down the thread look like they don't stack up as in impossible amounts of data written in the time the drive is reported as being awake. If it is true and M1 computers start bricking in two years time, which I find unlikely, then these people can take their computers to be fixed, if that doesn't happen, a company can't sell something doesn't work, so I would take it to small claims and exercise my contractual right for the goods supplied to be fit for purpose.
- supermatt 6y agoAs always, this thread is full of FUD instead of facts. You are spot on with your 1% statement (which could be as little as half that, due to rounding). The percentage used is base on the figures set by the manufacturer. It is the one used in drive warranties. Also - worth pointing out that it doesnt mean the drives stop taking writes at 100%. This counter actually goes up to 255 (per spec), where 255 means 255+. Its literally just for life "expectancy". Some people saying to ignore that and to look at TBW. They simply dont know what they are talking about! No discussion around the nand type on these drives. Is it SLC, MLC, TLC, QLC? or is it one if the hybrid modes, such as pSLC, or iTLC which act like the higher categories? This can mean the difference between <1k and >100k+ P/E cycles. We simply dont know what the OS is doing. I know that I can have WAY more applications open (and remaining responsive) on my 8GB M1, than i could my 16GB i7. It doesnt feel like traditional swap - so maybe its not. Maybe its way more aggressive, suspending entire applications to disk in the background - taking advantage of the massive bandwidth to make the UX better at the cost of drive writes. We simply dont know. From following the original thread, the vast majority of people reporting 1% usage since launch. There are a handful with higher usage than that. We dont know what these people are doing on those machines, but its evident from the figures that that the writes generally scale to the amount of ram on the machine. 8GB machines generally seem to be a lot less usage than 16GB. Maybe these people with HUGE amounts of writes are running a memory hog like chrome, which consumes all available ram on the machine, and which is paging when they background it. Some people reporting 8hr daily usage since launch with 200 drive power on hours (drive hours arent same as uptime, as drives can be suspended for power saving), others reporting 800 for same "uptime". Clearly it is due to the workload. EITHER WAY, the "percentage used" is definitely the figure to go on, because only the manufacturer knows exactly what NAND types they are using (unless someone wants to enlighten us?) as well as the wear levelling algorithms on the controller.
- dmix 6y ago> Maybe they are suspending entire applications to disk in the background This tactic of suspending unused tabs has MASSIVELY reduced by browser memory usage. Originally with "The Great Suspender" then built into FF natively when I switched to that. This should be used everywhere. It's seriously game changer for some like me who keeps open 100 tabs.
- stkdump 6y agoI think its Apples turn to respond. I don't see this as anyone elses responsibility. Until then, all available data clearly points to a premature death of many M1 machines.
- st3fan 6y agoOn top of that, you don't get answers by just posting numbers and blaming Apple. Numbers do not mean anything without context. It would be really interesting to understand what applications folks with both higher and lower numbers use daily. And what their developer habits are. Do they use a specific browser or a specific toolchain? But ultimately, someone should probably write a little app or daemon that can just keep an eye on what specific processes are doing disk i/o. I think if people ran that for a while and then posted _that_ output, there would probably be some better answers.
- praveenperera 6y agodatapoint: CPU: M1 Model: MacBook Air Age: 1 month RAM: 16GB SSD: 512GB SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 27 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 0% Data Units Read: 3,463,221 [1.77 TB] Data Units Written: 1,571,934 [804 GB] Host Read Commands: 51,945,085 Host Write Commands: 23,518,851 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 83 Power On Hours: 18 Unsafe Shutdowns: 3 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0
- asadkn 6y agoI have gone through 2 SSDs in my rMBP mid 2015 (16GB RAM). This was the last model with replaceable SSDs, I believe. I am on my third now: SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 38 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 10% Percentage Used: 7% Data Units Read: 82,062,737 [42.0 TB] Data Units Written: 81,415,281 [41.6 TB] Host Read Commands: 539,567,311 Host Write Commands: 561,934,808 Controller Busy Time: 3,863 Power Cycles: 3,059 Power On Hours: 2,705
- _wli 6y agoI am sitting at 10% after 60 days... so my drive will go readonly in 1.6 years. === START OF SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 33 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 10% Data Units Read: 546,457,001 [279 TB] Data Units Written: 510,545,911 [261 TB] Host Read Commands: 3,130,642,888 Host Write Commands: 1,491,509,201 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 118 Power On Hours: 930 Unsafe Shutdowns: 18 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0
- floatingatoll 6y ago> (2) that they are not a bug in the IOKit implementation used by smartctl "While we're looking into the reports, know that the SMART data being reported to the third-party utility is incorrect, as it pertains to wear on our SSDs" said an AppleInsider source within Apple corporate not authorized to speak on behalf of the company. The source refused to elaborate any further on the matter when pressed for specifics. https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/02/23/questions-raised-about-m1-mac-ssd-longevity-based-on-incomplete-data https://appleinsider.com/articles/21/02/23/questions-raised-...