4 ms·
Given his use case which involves massive video and photo editing, and the reports of excessive writes on the SSD in the M1s is it possible his SSD just reached
by yumraj 6y ago
Given his use case which involves massive video and photo editing, and the reports of excessive writes on the SSD in the M1s is it possible his SSD just reached EOL?
I don’t know what the symptoms of an SSD reaching EOL are, would it just stop responding at all?
I don’t think we still have heard anything from Apple about the massive SSD writes and that for me is the biggest concern before making an M1 based purchase.
- Saris 6y agoI’d be incredibly surprised if that was the case, even cheap budget SSDs have 500+ TBW ratings. I’m amazed this person had 800GB of important data on a laptop and yet zero backups. Especially when a backup service like backblaze is $5 a month and you just set it up in 2 minutes and it runs on its own.
- salawat 6y agoI am surprised this person had an encyclopedia and didn't Xerox it, leaving it on someone else's bookshelf. Contrary to popular belief, not everyone reaches for someone else's computer to look after their important things. Sad though it is that they learned their lesson the hard way, they can't really be faulted for it.
- vorpalhex 6y agoNothing keeping you from using time machine with your own NAS or harddrive.
- BearOso 6y agoIf there was 800GB of static data, it was almost full, so the wear-leveling process wouldn’t be optimal and it would write over a small part of the flash cells over and over. In that case you could exceed the program-erase lifetime, but not necessarily the TBW. We know the total TBW was high, though, so it was even more excessive. From what I’ve read, Apple has fixed this problem in a recent Mac OS version. Apparently, it was a swapping bug.
- lawnchair_larry 6y agoWhere did you read that it was fixed or acknowledged as a bug? It definitely was not fixed.
- BearOso 6y agoThis thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ssd-swap-high-usage-of-terabytes-written.2284893/ https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ssd-swap-high-usage-of-... Posters had narrowed down the excessive writes down by limiting memory usage, so they knew it was a swap problem, and some users said the latest OS fixed it. Now that I’ve checked it again, they’re saying it’s better but not fixed.
- 542458 6y agoI believe that modern SSDs shuffle data around so that wear levelling does still work even with nearly full drives.
- pkaye 6y agoIts the difference between static and dynamic wear leveling. Static wear leveling will shuffle around the data in static blocks to even out the program-erase cycles.
- gowld 6y agoDo M1 Macs have user-facing drive health / write-count reports?
- yumraj 6y agoYes, there are some reports, including some posts on HN itself, where people are seeing unusually high TBs of writes - most likely due to swap. See this: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=m1+writes https://hn.algolia.com/?q=m1+writes
- dannyw 6y agoSSDs that reach EOL should go into read only mode; not die.
- BearOso 6y agoMaybe it did. But it was the boot drive and soldered to the motherboard. So the OS would need to write to it and there’s no way to get the data off in a third-party manner. That’s kind of the big issue.