5 ms·

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

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.
  - gazby 6y ago
    You'd have to verify I'm right, but this page describes how to change the cache location: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/storage-and-data-information/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/storage-and-data-info...
boredpandas777 6y ago
This may be related: I had to switch off Time Machine on MacbookHD (main disk) by excluding it from the Time Machine preferences, and reinstall the OS to erase the previous copies it had made, all ~400GB of it (on my 499GB disk)... As the user, I was not asked for permission to allow Time Machine to use up to 80% of available disk capacity. It was backing up so many copies of the data until I noticed I had left only 8GB of free space and I only noticed because Quicktime screen recording started crashing due to insufficient disk space. Basically, the decision by Apple is to use up to 80% of the available disk space to save copies of the data on that disk without user permission, and because it checks and reconciles the amount it's using every so often you can easily end up with 0% free capacity if you e.g. record a lot of videos in between.
- Tsiklon 6y ago
  Time machine should clear out old snapshots when pressed for disk space, that's very strange.
  - boredpandas777 6y ago
    It didn't do that for some reason. Also, I could not remove the snapshot form the command line or force TM to thin them. I had to reinstall the OS.
- ojnabieoot 6y ago
  This is extremely good to know, thank you - I have turned off my M1 Mini and probably won’t be booting it until Apple announces a fix and explanation about the hard drive issue. I am not quite sure if this Time Machine business is directly related (though it might be due by poorly optimized rewrites, particularly if there’s outstanding hardware shenanigans with encryption on M1s). It is baffling that the disk usage appears to be a deliberate decision.
whatever1 6y ago
update From the activity monitor: Uptime 1 day & 6 hours Kernel_task : 418 GB written - 84 GB read Microsoft edge helper: 23-4 Launchd: 19-1 Mds_stores: 9-9 Photolibraryd: 4-8 In the last 24 hours I have not touched the mini, I just switched it on yesterday to check something online and switched off the monitor.

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.
- gazby 6y ago
  You'd have to verify I'm right, but this page describes how to change the cache location: https://support.spotify.com/us/article/storage-and-data-information/ https://support.spotify.com/us/article/storage-and-data-info...

boredpandas777 6y ago

This may be related: I had to switch off Time Machine on MacbookHD (main disk) by excluding it from the Time Machine preferences, and reinstall the OS to erase the previous copies it had made, all ~400GB of it (on my 499GB disk)... As the user, I was not asked for permission to allow Time Machine to use up to 80% of available disk capacity. It was backing up so many copies of the data until I noticed I had left only 8GB of free space and I only noticed because Quicktime screen recording started crashing due to insufficient disk space. Basically, the decision by Apple is to use up to 80% of the available disk space to save copies of the data on that disk without user permission, and because it checks and reconciles the amount it's using every so often you can easily end up with 0% free capacity if you e.g. record a lot of videos in between.

Tsiklon 6y ago
Time machine should clear out old snapshots when pressed for disk space, that's very strange.
- boredpandas777 6y ago
  It didn't do that for some reason. Also, I could not remove the snapshot form the command line or force TM to thin them. I had to reinstall the OS.
ojnabieoot 6y ago
This is extremely good to know, thank you - I have turned off my M1 Mini and probably won’t be booting it until Apple announces a fix and explanation about the hard drive issue. I am not quite sure if this Time Machine business is directly related (though it might be due by poorly optimized rewrites, particularly if there’s outstanding hardware shenanigans with encryption on M1s). It is baffling that the disk usage appears to be a deliberate decision.

whatever1 6y ago

update From the activity monitor: Uptime 1 day & 6 hours Kernel_task : 418 GB written - 84 GB read Microsoft edge helper: 23-4 Launchd: 19-1 Mds_stores: 9-9 Photolibraryd: 4-8 In the last 24 hours I have not touched the mini, I just switched it on yesterday to check something online and switched off the monitor.