Apple M1 SSD Lifespan Ageing. Do YOU have the problem?

[@andersongomesbd]

SIMPLY THE MOST FANTASTIC VIDEO ABOUT SWAP MEMORY EVER!!!! Congratulations on your video and all the effort you put into research to get to this INCREDIBLE result! SIMPLY THE BEST!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Wow, thank you!

[@LucaRuzzola]

I agree, what a great and simple explanation, thank you! Keep up with these amazing tech videos! Your competence really shows, have a great day

[@santanawilian]

This is the best explanation on this topic that I've ever seen! Thank you, Mark!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Wow, thanks!

[@SKYz64]

4.3TB total, 4 months in so around 37GB a day. I'm more than safe with my 512GB ssd :) The step-by-step tutorial really helped! Most other tech KZbinrs leave out certain steps. Much appreciated!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Excellent. On the money.

[@easyvelvet77]

Feels like back to class again! Amazingly clear... Thx ! I saw your other video about M1 8/16 Gb Ram using Logic Pro, and got it well. Thx again! I'm using Logic Pro 10.6 with my old macbook air, for playing what i would call "live sets", playing for around 3 hours, 25 tracks more or less in Logic pro project (16 to 20 elements, samples and loops, per tracks in this "live loops" way) so ... i can have around 500 pre-loaded elements in the Ram! My macbook Air running an intel i7/8Gb of RAM is totally ...SMOKING!!! I don't even speak of the buffer that i need... at least at 512 (if not 1024!) Not to have my CPU crashing... For sure i need to limit the VSTs & plugins use to the strict necessary: Apple EQ on each track (over the magic EQ3 from fabfilter...), few compressors on my groups, one IR1 Rev, one H-delay... Very very tight, to keep all this running. So? i go for the Update with those magic M1 chips. I'm about to order the New 14" Macbook pro thinking of 1Tb SSD and 16Gb Ram, (32Gb seams extremely massive and 400$ for it a bit excessive... Don't you think? Some say that 16Gb on those new ones are as powerful as 32Gb on the old Intel model...) But i'm mostly wondering of the "utility" of 10 cores CPU versus 8... A video about it, or any suggestion, would be amazing! It's seriously a pleasure to hear you talking so clearly and with so much ease, about those ..."Things" that we are bound to: to express, to create, to work and communicate! Shine!

[@mark-ze4en]

I hear your questions regarding 16 vs 32 Gig ram. What I understand is regardless of what pc or Mac 16 G ram is still 16 G. You can't really expect the ' Shared memory' to make up the difference in memory pressure. I have had cash in hand for a new machine for months trying to determine what the most advantages configuration is for my modest studio. I have a sub powered older Dell quad core that has such high latency when using external idi controllers that makes it useless. As well I have heard that external ssd are not as responsive on recall of samples and I am tempted to pay the additional$400.00 for an extra terabyte of ssd in the mac( mini M1 or Mac studio Max) just to give me the piece of mind .

[@plfarinha]

Hi Mark, thanks for the great video on ssd wearing. I'm more inclined to buy an M1 now, since the ssd wear was one of my biggest doubts. However, could you share where you found the 0.3 factor for DWPD? I'd like to learn more on that before I make a final decision. Thanks, Pedro

[@HansJoachimMaier]

Thank you. A nice explanation! I have a 8/512 GB Mac Mini. I got mine at the 16th of January.Currently I have 2.43TB written, so I am at 40.5 GB/day. But I am using it much. It runs probably around 15 hours per day (Homeoffice, private usage).

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Good numbers!

[@jamesgreen332]

Wow.. thank you for showing me the way, not into such things so it's amazing that I was able to get my numbers. So, I use about 27 GB a day on my MBA 250 GB/8 GB RAM

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Glad it was helpful! Thats nice small numbers. No worries.

[@JerryHerrera]

The most complete explanation I've seen after weeks. Thank you for investing your time in this.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

You're very welcome!

[@72151]

Love the old school relationships, easier to understand. Thank you kindly.

[@sovansarkar5188]

As a Bachelor in Computer Science student my daily write is approx 27gb. I do all the college assignments and coding and attending Gmeet and Zoom for online classes watching video lectures and surfing through the web etc etc. I'm currently using the 8gb/256gb version of M1 MacBook Air.

[@MuhdFaizFXIZZ]

I'm using my base MacBook Air for university works and my "Data Write Per Day" is 6.5GB. I appreciate these kind of proper evaluation.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Nice!

[@just_pierre9730]

Another masterclass! Thank you, Mark. My Mac Mini M1 16/512 : 2,92TB written since december 21 2020. I use it about 4 hours per day, mainly for Logic Pro X in Rosetta 2 mode and Ableton Live 11. Looks like the SSD will last longer than I do(62)....... :)

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Thats a worry when a computer can outlive you! I feel your pain!

[@ananthprem8804]

Thanks for the video, Mark. Just sharing data from my system. I have a 2014 MacBook Pro 13 with a 256GB SSD (intel machine of course). I’ve used it everyday for the past 6.5 years. My usage metrics are as follows: TDW: 55TB Daily Written Data: ~23GB

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Cool

[@kostadinb]

I don't have an M1 Mac, but I am considering one very soon. When I saw the news about the large amount of SWAP on the 8GB models, I got concerned a bit. But Mark, You've put all of these concernes to rest, very informative and educational, thank You !

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Glad to be able to help with the context.

[@cebulagner]

Excellent explanation Mark! Love your work! Question, is it possible to allocate swap memory to an external SSD?

[@jonathanpage6813]

I know windows used to (and maybe still does) have a feature like this, but Mac does not. The reason it doesn’t is because an external SSD is many times slower than the internal one so it would slow the whole computer down as it was waiting for memory to write and be read from the external SSD.

[@BraveNuword]

This is a great video. Thank you! And wish you a happy and healthy long life so you can happily run the test on your SSD after 50 yrs.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Amen to that!

[@obsidian9651]

Discovered your channel last night and I gotta say what a gem! I love your teaching style!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Welcome! and Thank you!

[@bieda4592]

Amazing video. You should have way more views and subscribers!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Working on it!

[@r.s9556]

M1 Mac with 16 gb ram shows zero swap usage even when playing multiple games on it and even if an app is left open for couple of days in the background it handles it really well left it on standby it has amazing battery life. Always have latest updates installed on your device and any bugs will be fixed automatically and go for the 16 gb variant if you’re using it for heavy tasks.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Very good. Fore more specialist applications the latest updates the latest updates sometimes break things! I think at the moment with M1 it _is_ important to ride the updates as they happen. Later... when things are more established I may like to not be fixing it unless it is broken.

[@marcinha1973]

Brilliant. Took off fear before buying my first Mac.

[@wikkidselekta]

7 months old M1 MBP w/512GB ssd...Data Units Written: 12,074,227 [6.18 TB] via SmartMon...23GB DWPD via Activity Monitor...20GB

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Thats ok.

[@AdamHumburg]

Such a good video! I am no longer concerned. Purchased a 512GB M1 Pro one month ago and have done 24.77GB per day. I am interested to see how that number changes after having done all of my data migration and app install duties. On 3.75 (roughly) days of uptime my average is 3.94GB. That’ll do nicely.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

No worries there then Adam, like we said, In my opinion this was a blown up issue and effects very few people. Let's see!

[@Gongtopia]

This was great. I'm not a techie, but you explained it all in a way that I could understand and actually use. I think that unless you were some sort of business crunching massive amounts of data seven days a week, you would be fine. And if you were a business like that, you'd probably replace your computers well before you wore out the SSD drives. Thanks for another great video!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Thankyou!

[@Esh831]

its been a week I bought the MBA 8gb + 512 gb variant so far I have never seen anything huge in terms of swap memory..I am a medium user.

[@dscruf]

Thank you. Terrific video. I'm at 28 GB/day on a MBP with 1TB SSD. Had the machine since Jan 1. It's used heavily for Audio Work (Logic). I also teach daily with it - about 3 hours of live class time on Zoom Mon-Fri teaching comp sci, programming and front/back web dev. Still, that can't amount to many writes. My initial install of 500 GB of audio sample libraries in early Jan skews this heavily. Lately, it's averaging only 9GB/day (100 GB with an uptime of 11 days).

[@MarkPayneAudio]

That is very low write rate :-) Can I ask, is this a 16GB or 8GB system?

[@Maximara]

Great video. The only thing you should have covered is how to use the percentage to figure the lifespan of the drive. Ie if you use 1% in 2 months then you will use 100% in 200 months or *16.6 years* . I don't think it is Apple haters but people who just look at the write number and not the percentage number.

[@basakarunava]

One of the best videos on this topic that is getting lot of attention of late. A must watch for anyone who want to know more about the truth. I just applied your techniques I find that my DWPD is coming to around 23.5gb. My M1 system is a 512gb configuration! A big thank you for sharing such wonderful explanation!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Yes that's small beans usage. All good!

[@nellwackwitz]

Wow, thank you so much Mark! I've learned lots from you! I've had my 1 TB, 16 GB RAM, M1 Air for two days! 😀 Using your program, I've written 515 Gigabytes over those days, which divides out to be 257.5 GB/day. I'm not too worried since I've been downloading lots of programs into my SSD. Using the activity monitor, I have written 78.4 GB over the past 22:35 hours. I think I'm alright.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Great to hear! That will propably settle down anyway and it sounds like you are in install phase as you say.

[@ale_filmmaker3513]

Well I have had my MBA 8gb for 3 days and this is the results I am getting, I am using FCPX and keeping my video files only on my external SSD, I am starting to think theres something wrong with my laptop. Data Units Read: 3,366,935 [1.72 TB] Data Units Written: 4,000,152 [2.04 TB]

[@TheMrboombostic]

Ale_Filmmaker did it ever settle down?

[@ale_filmmaker3513]

@@TheMrboombostic yes it did, I think the main reason it settled is because I am creating proxies for my 4k footage (1080p) and turned off GPU acceleration in Lightroom, I am editing all day and I am getting around 30 gb/day of data writen, I am also using a external SSD (I am not sure how much that helps).

[@Xlippo]

If the SSD breaks down after 3 years, great, thanks for the free M4. Apple warranty/service is great.

[@familiarshadow1]

I've had my M1 for ~345 days: 67.5 TB writes comes out to ~195GB/day 1TB drive and usage shows only 2%

[@umue11]

My Mac Mini 2018 has less than 15GB DWPD. Bought it in Dec. 2018 and it has a 128GB SSD. So, even with the smallest SSD option I'm good. However it also shows me that my system writes less than half the data than yours on a M1 Mac. FYI, I only use the internal SSD for the OS and applications. All my files are on external devices.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

We think a lot of this is about M1 systems. The worry is that they are VERY efficient with memory management allowing the systems to run performantly with very little RAM for big tasks. The internal SSD is used as backup swap space maybe more than would be expected and some users see BIG write rates as a result. That is the theory. You are probably not going to see this issue on older hardware anyway.

[@normjones6916]

You are an amazing educator "the best", wow great info on this topic

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Appreciate that!

[@sady01]

Loved the theory and the explanation and the brief detour to contemplation of our mortal existence as a Mac user at the end

[@vacation_generation]

Where have you been all my life? Watched a couple of your videos this morning, and I already know 10x more than I knew before. Well explained in easy terms (let’s face it most IT stuff is obscured behind unnecessarily scary jargon which I’m sure is aimed at making some people look smarter than others). I’ll be watching this space for more! Excellent presentation.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Many thanks!

[@chouaiboo15]

Thanks for the detailed explanation of the memory swap on apple M1. I have noticed that using a memory cleaning application like Memory clean 2 or similar program will push more data to be written on your SSD . So I believe using these applications will increase the data written on your SSD just by pressing the clean button which does no magic to the RAM, it only moves data from RAM to SSD even when your RAM is not under pressure. We would be better off if we let macOS do its magic in managing memory then using some random third party application that does nothing special.

[@robinthomsoncomposer]

Erudite and clear as usual mate Going to start showing my IT students a selection of your videos that I think will be appropriate for them Thanks again for the hours of effort you are clearly putting in to these videos

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Please do! That is most rewarding. Back in the day I taught engineers and customers at Hewlett Packard but that was a good 20 years ago (and some) :-)

[@robinthomsoncomposer]

Well I am not surprised to hear that. Your ability to break the material down in to bite sized chunks and accompany it with relevant extra explanatory material is the mark of a good teacher.

[@Super80sMan]

Excellent video! I have a 16GB RAM 256GB M1 Air. Running smartmons using your tutorial I found that I have written just over 4 TB is 7 months, which comes out to about 19 to 20 GB per day, well under the 75 GB per day. So theoretically this M1 machine should last for quite a while before the SSD wears out.

[@StratsRUs]

Thank you for taking the fear out of any fear-mongering going on.Great to know.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

My pleasure!

[@mwang168]

So, what's the expected life span for a 512GB SSD? 750TBW or 1PBW? Thanks.

[@MahyarKa]

I'm using my Macbook air "256 GB _ 8 GB" for "20 days" TBW=630 (32GB/day). Not a huge deal but I will be more careful and will observe the following days , although mind that we tend to write a lot more data when we get a new device, so no worries .

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Good numbers!

[@johnnyschuetten]

Thank you so much for your time and expertise making this excellent video - this was so incredibly useful and answered so many questions at once…and also helped tremendously in the decision about the capacity of the SSD for my next MBP. Thanks again! 😊

[@kaitran]

Great detailed video, sorry I only watched the last 10 minutes video, but how much RAM do you have in your machine?

[@MarkPayneAudio]

16GB

[@tassawar.sheikh]

Please have a quick read and reply. Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 3% Data Units Read: 119,134,293 [60.9 TB] Data Units Written: 98,124,552 [50.2 TB] I have had the machine for year now. So according to this tool, 50TB is only 3% of the total health? Dividing 100\3%(health) = 33.3 Multiply 50.2TB*33.3 = 1673TB/1.63PB So is 1673TB/1.63PB the total expected TBW of my specific drive?

[@nickcorr7244]

Mark really interesting and explained in a way I could fathom. My Mac Pro Mid 2012 OS 11.2.3, uptime 3 days data read 27.7GB / written 26.35GB SSD 1TB Seagate FireCuda 120 SSD ZA1000GM10001. Thanks for a great channel.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Thats write rate is nice small numbers :-)

[@_diegomadrigal]

This tech educational videos along with music production are your strength. Keep it going , love the content so far!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Thanks, will do!

[@alecrimneto7856]

I'm really impressed by the quality of this video. Brilliant stuff.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Thanks!

[@joeldanielsson]

84gb/day here and i use my mac all day long every day, i run illustrator, photoshop and some music production softwares. i got 1tb of ssd.

[@cogbeatz]

You're the best Sir Mark Payne. Great tutorial, wonderful explanation.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Wow, thanks!

[@cogbeatz]

@@MarkPayneAudio You're welcome Sir.

[@TheFourthWinchester]

There's also the fact that SSDs are fickle when the free space is less than 30% on a drive. My friend bought a MacBook Air based on my advice and she's getting insane 40GB+/day writes. All she uses it is for streaming content and almost nothing else.

[@timgurr1876]

Great explanation of SSD writes. I learned a lot. Don't have an M1 machine yet, but looking to upgrade a mid-2010 iMac, so this video has really helped to diminish any concern about SSD wearing out too soon. Thanks.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Glad it was helpful Tim! Are you going to wait for M2/M1X or take the plunge soon?

[@normjones6916]

You've made me more curious to use the terminal , whats a good resource to become unscared :)

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Ok so I am rusty but I learnt how to operating and administer Unix systems back in my computer career days with HP. macOS is Unix compliant. I used to teach Unix system admin to customers back in the day when people would attend a residential 1 week class for such a thing! This kind of resource is out there if you want to put some time into it www.guru99.com/terminal-file-manager.html

[@thebasspapa]

Great, now I am more relaxed and can calculate myself. Thanks a lot, this was outstanding

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Glad it helped!

[@Problembeing]

Fantastic explanation. Clear, precise and simple. Thank you. Will have to look at the disk writes after a long render to have a better idea of where I stand. I just bought my M1 Max, 32Gb RAM/GPU, 1Tb SSD a couple of weeks ago, so I hope at least Blender and Logic won't destroy it too soon! I do get a whopping amount of swap whilst rendering and watching KZbin on Safari at the same time, but I'll be sure to keep checking my daily usage to see where I'm at and if there is anything I can do more efficiently. Thanks again! Subbed. Slightly less anxious about it now.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Cool!

[@jayeshmv]

Such a brilliant and underrated video, hats off Mr. Payne.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Thanks!

[@francescocolangelo6900]

Hi Mark, thanks for the nice video, it’s very clear but it triggered a concern: According to your arguments, I see that the DWPD should be a function of the actual free space instead of the total SSD space. Is that correct? And if so, would that means that we should seriously consider to always have a min of ~100GB free in our SSD? (Such that we can “safely” write our 100GBx0.3 = 30GB per day, which matches your estimation that we can assume as a typical number.) A feedback would be appreciated! Thanks!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

I like your thinking. The SSD can only write to the free space that is left. Unless the controller is operating some kind of re-write/migrate policy where old established data that we have read only attitudes to is migrated around so that the free space (as a result) is also being migrated around?

[@kurtweber1267]

Ditto on the other comments made. Excellent explanation and real world testing. I love the speed of the internal SSD but this issue had me nervous. Fears calmed.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Excellent Kurt!

[@rodrigo-5967]

wow this is amazing, the explanation was clear and the video was very informative, keep up with the good job! (I even subscribed :) )

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Thanks for the sub!

[@godoscureful]

Hey Mark. This was such a nice video, congrats !. Nice edition btw. This might be offtrack but I was wondering… could you do a video talking a bit about how to take care of the M1’s battery ?. There are a couple of videos out there on youtube but I just love your way of explaining stuff !!! Thank you so much, and cheers from Chile >:D

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Not sure I have that planned!

[@SP-qk5iu]

Awesome explanation as ever, thank you Mark! I have been watching your videos a lot now, and I must say, I am really enjoying these.This is for all as a question. I am on the verge of buying a Macbook, the only thing that I need suggestion with is; will Minitab software and Power Bi work on it? I have been researching a lot about this, but have not got a definite answer and that is stalling my first Macbook purchase. I would buy the 512 / 8. Would parallels do the trick for me, not sure

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Sorry that I am not using Parallels or the other s/w you mention so I cannot add value there!

[@SP-qk5iu]

Thanks much for the reply Mark 👍

[@kengkhim]

Thank you for investing your time in this, love from Malaysia.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

My pleasure!

[@bermylife]

Have the base MacBook Air 8GB ram. After almost 1 week I have only 7.87GB Data written. Not sure why people are blowing up this data swap issue.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

This is a very real issue for some people.

[@bermylife]

@@MarkPayneAudio that's the key "SOME people" the post and videos make it sound like its all m1 Macs

[@TheMrboombostic]

That, my friend, gets you another subscriber! Perfect explanation for a layman like myself.

[@MIK33EY]

First time ever watching your channel, will be back. Excellent explanation. 10/10 with a little bit of background history too. By the way, you are the first person I’ve ever seen on KZbin to use an iPad Pro in a way that’s more than just a “teleprompter” let alone the Apple Pencil and certainly the first to screen capture from it rather than using an overhead camera shot.👍🏼👏🏼👏🏼 Out of curiosity what are you using to cast your iPad screen for capture? 🤷🏼‍♂️✌🏼

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Yes, when I teach in a classroom I whiteboard a lot so this seemed to be a natural alternative for me. It took a while to find a WB that worked for me and this is MS Whiteboard, part of 365. I just screen record it on the iPad ... with audio so that I can sync it later in FCP.

[@MIK33EY]

@@MarkPayneAudio you do it seamlessly; so much so that I was fooled into asking the wrong question. Honestly thought you were capturing on the fly rather than merging in the final edit. Maybe you could look into doing such & cut a step out in your workflow - capture over USB-C from your iPad Pro.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Arh... well I do capture on the fly. What you see me type on camera is what you are seeing on the capture screen. I have to merge and sync 4 elements. 1. The recorded audio... from a studio mic above me off camera (mostly ! :-)) 2. The main camera, 3.The screen captures from any demo computers 4. The whiteboard.

[@joycesim]

Best vids indeed, super enjoyable and educational

[@bobdeadbeef]

Well, my iMac 27.0 TB written, which works out to about 180 GB/day, which sounds about right for my usage, which is going to be hell of a lot more than most people see. 0 used from the wear pool. I've got a 2 TB drive, half full. My only real worry is running out of disk space. Well, no, it's running out of USB ports to plug an external SSD into... Part of the reason I listened to the whole thing was to understand what people's concerns were-just the generic write cycle issue, or if there was something driving a high rate. In all my years of heavy usage even with smaller, older SSDs, I've never once seen an SSD wear out, or fail in any way. I'm not denying it's an issue to consider in certain circumstances, just that my experience is far beyond the typical usage and wholly favors SSDs. Magnetic drives' record has improved enormously since the days when we cleaned heads on 80 MB washing machines, but "hard drive failure" is something I just don't think about anymore. There are so many other risks to our data to motivate backups! I knew 99+% of the material, so the pacing was slow enough for me to pay attention to how you were explaining. Every time I'd think "but you need to explain..." you'd be explaining it before I'd finish the thought. For example, cylinders... You did a really nice job (I think; I'm not the right test subject!) The big thing I didn't know about was smartmontools. Thanks for that!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Thanks Bob, your comments mean a lot. I too remember head cleaning! You just reminded me. We should have mentioned sector skew from one surface to another which allowed the data placement to be shifted positionally in the cylinder to allow for head switch latency, that just came back to me.

[@bobdeadbeef]

​@@MarkPayneAudio Yup. At an even lower level of detail was the low-level formatting with bit patterns to synchronize the bit clock, the sector address, so you could know you were reading/about to write the correct sector, a gap so you didn't overwrite the sector address, an ECC checksum at the end of the data capable of repairing something like 11 bits of consecutive error. A lot of details I don't remember anymore. Most of the time you could take all that as a given, but with a new model of drive, you would sometimes have to figure it all out. Disk controllers weren't as reliable then, either. I remember a few years later, when sealed "Winchester" drives were the norm, visiting a customer site with an unbootable system. Found in block 0 (which held a directory of bootable images), that a defective disk controller had written a 1 bit every N bits (the size of the write shift-register) whether it needed it or not. Replaced the controller, then set about figuring out which bits should have been zero instead, fixed them, and it booted. It was always kind of cool to identify a specific hardware failure from observed behavior at the software level. Found an ALU gate failure affecting a lesser-used operation once. The reliability levels required of modern hardware are astounding. This iMac can do in 1 second what would have taken hours on the system I started with (not counting the GPU!) and do it day after day without a single error.

[@OShackHennessy]

I’d be interested to see the difference in writes between 8 vs 16gb models based on fairly heavy use of memory and how that affects ssd lifespan. When my wife got her M1 mini I spec’d out a 16gb with 1TB storage just for the heck of it.

[@ghost-user559]

From what I have seen 16 GB is actually using less than half on average. Seems like that 8GB is the real issue and people tend to push these machines beyond what they really should because of the marketing. Someone said they had 18 GB swap daily written in their hardcore workflow on 8GB Ram, and they got the 16 and it went to an average of 2.5 GB swap per day. No way to know their exact situation but that’s pretty good numbers overall. 32 GB would probably be zero swapping for most people, but I hardly think it’s worth the cost for most people on a reasonable budget.

[@hankshippovsky7546]

Yes!!! :-) Thank you very much, Professor Payne! :-))) Great answers for people like me, who are using computers, but have no idea of how they actually work! 🙏

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Prof Payne.... I like that but unfortunately.... I am just a Mr!

[@hankshippovsky7546]

@@MarkPayneAudio hey, you‘re at least „Professor“ Payne, I think...;-)

[@mard192837]

There is a report that someone in China is able to de-solder and upgrade the SSD. So, I guess, there is some hope that the whole machine won't be fried if the SSD fails prematurely. Not to mention that Apple will try to protect its reputation if a lot of SSD start failing by offering some sort of warranty replacement program.

[@tilleyroadaffairproduction6752]

Hi there, did you make a video on external ssd drives lately? I thought you had mentionned you did in a previous video on Macbook air M1.

[@Raja995mh33]

Just tried it on my MacBook Air M2 which I got with 10-core GPU and 512GB but only 8GB RAM because it was the only model available besides the pure base one. And I surely was slightly concerned because of all the stupid articles about the whole topic but for no reason. I currently have a total written of 1.63TB in 38 days. That's less than 43GB per day which is far away from the about 156GB I could get each day based on the 512GB.

[@2cvman1]

thanks for your explanation Ik have a 256 GB en have it sinds 22 febr. I have written in total 1110GB, that's about 39 / 40 gb per day... I'm safe! Thanks!!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Good numbers

[@kamil478]

Mark, do we really know what is DWPD of SSDs soldered to the board in MBP 256? Kioxia even delivers its customers with drives at 3.0 level of DWPD which would significantly prolong lifespan of these drives.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

I do not know exactly which SSD's are used in which systems and indeed this may be subject to change anyway! I think the 0.3 factor I am using for DWPD is pessimistic for sure but better to be that way I feel.

[@kamil478]

@@MarkPayneAudio I did send you email with link to my post on the forum. Unfortunatel I can't paste it here, but it might be interesting for you

[@pedroguerrero5836]

Hi, thanks for the video very clear. Why the factor is 0.3 ?

[@mejlgaardbliddal]

Based on your excellent explanation I got a write per day of 41GB On my 512GB MacBook Air SSD

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Thats all good.

[@mejlgaardbliddal]

@@MarkPayneAudio Yes I know that do to your excellent explanation. of how to read the data in the log.had to rewatch the entering the correct command in the terminal a few times do to me making an error in how I wrote the command.

[@LindseyandCaleb]

Great video! Thanks for sharing this information. I'm a heavier user on my 1tb m1pro 16. I'm using 97.7gb a day on average. I will say that my computer has been using much less memory since a recent update so I'm sure that is helping me stay out of swap. SMART still shows 0% usage in 130 days of use. I'm happy to know that I will get a long life out of this computer and be able to pass it on for life after me.

[@TheYearOfJerome]

Base model M1 Macbook Air. 77GB written per day. :(

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Feels a little high. What are you running? What is the big memory hog in Activity monitor... order the processes by memory size and look at the top ones. Also in the disk section. Which process is the top disk IO writer?

[@TheYearOfJerome]

@@MarkPayneAudio launchd and kernel_task. now it's 93GB per day. i'm most using office stuff -- microsoft outlook and teams, as well as watching youtube videos. :(

[@tonyhamilton9942]

Great vid! Thanks for the explanation. What if I'm going way over the daily limit? I have 20,72 TB written in less than a month on a brand new 256 gb Air. I wasn't planning on keeping this device for more than a year, but after doing the math it seems like I need to upgrade ASAP :(

[@accentontheoff]

It’d be great to know how many hours of use per day added up to that number for you. Great video, thanks.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

I am not sure this number is useful because it depends on what I am doing when I am using the system?

[@accentontheoff]

@@MarkPayneAudio Yes of course.

[@Teschnertron]

Another great explanation. Thank you very much.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

You are welcome!

[@elijahjflowers]

Thanks, what app were you using to make those doodles?

[@liaketali]

Hi. Thanks for this very informative video. I recently impulse bought a discounted Mac Mini 8GB M1 with 256GB and mainly intend to use it to learn and use Logic (moving over from PC and Cakewalk). I plan on on using an external ssd to store my Logic projects as well as the Logic sound library and other plugin samples/sound libraries. I thought that this would be the best way to reduce writes on the internal drive. Is this a good idea?

[@MarkPayneAudio]

I would say... dont worry about it. The excessive write thing was more about memory pressure than usage of the disk by applications.

[@Rasmus-tz3zp]

Super pedagogical presentation over the basic important parts of the SSD, the terms and calculations! It made it really comprehendible and easy to understand! Good work!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

You're very welcome!

[@dwaynewyatt3]

Have you done the 11.2.3 update? I’d love to see a video on your experience with that.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Not yet!

[@johnadams3038]

The problem is Google Chrome caching and 3rd party browsers, just don’t use them.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Agreed.. I don’t get what is wrong with safari.

[@doppelmeyer]

Hey - maybe a dumb question, if you covered it in the video I'm sorry, my brain isn't wired for all this kind of stuff! I'm looking to get an M1 for music production, but I don't have the money to pay an extra 400 pounds for 1TB of memory, but I use a dedicated 2TB of external storage for all my files anyway. I only intend to use the M1 for music making, and I'll have another laptop for daily Internet use etc. Aside from whatever SSD writing I'll need to use to install Logic and such, will me using the external hard drive allow me to circumvent the problem of wearing out the SSD? Any advice would be appreciated, thanks!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Ok so the problems people are having are generally related to the disk write activity due to the use of Swap Space on the internal SSD. This is the area that is used on SSD when RAM memory is short and macOS has to start throwing things out of the house to make room. You will not really do a high degree of writing to any SSD, internal or external doing daily stuff including a load of audio and video. Like you I would support the use of external SSD for your projects. However I think 512GB is a nice place to be with internal SSD. And if you can then 16GB RAM will be safer than 8GB... more rooms in the RAM House. However, I use Logic and I find it very efficient on memory for my workload. And I would get away with 8GB. ... But I have 16GB... So if you can afford an Air with 512GB SSD and 16GB RAM, that would be "the money" IMHO.

[@doppelmeyer]

@@MarkPayneAudio Thanks for taking the time to explain! I'll take your advice into account, cheers

[@REAZNx]

Interesting, Although I've just done the calculations, and based on my swap usage, I estimate I only have around 400 days lifetime on my SSD. (Brand new mac btw). I have AppleCare and plan to upgrade after it ends anyway in 3 years, so I am not that concerned. Edit: for anyone wondering, my mac is 500GB and has used 3TB Data written in kernal_task (swap) in the last 7 days alone. Not including the 90TB Data units written in total so far for my 80-day old mac.

[@Mats_73]

Perfect explanation. I love your way of explaining things!!! Thank you Mark! :-)

[@MarkPayneAudio]

My pleasure!

[@crazyblob2860]

This is the most in depth video covering the issue. Thank you so much!!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Glad it was helpful!

[@salmam.7448]

You are amazing at explaining complex concepts!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Thanks!

[@emrekasgur4493]

Finally, It's a nice and technical expression instead of empty words. Thank you very much. In short, my MBP ( 16/256) won't die in five years If I limit myself to 75GB usage per day. Good to hear that. So, I have one more question. Will SSD slow down over time?

[@MarkPayneAudio]

I think this very unlikely and super difficult to measure... so no! :-)

[@n1cks-x9k]

Superb video, thank you for taking the time to explain the (non) issue. I've been writing ~200GB a day on a 8GB/512GB M1 Air. Percentage used: 0%

[@n1cks-x9k]

Just to update on this, having monitored for the past 24 hrs I've written 49GB to the drive. I've been running the Beta Big Sur since December, alongside Parallels Technical Preview and Microsoft Edge Insider so I suspect the cause was badly optimised software. The Epic Games launcher was also pummelling the CPU for a while before I noticed it on the Activity Monitor.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Good numbers

[@corvus00]

My own numbers on my M1 mini 16GB/1TB are 75GB writes/day. Given warranted 300GB of writes/day I'd say I'm within tolerances, yeah? I do wonder if my higher numbers are being caused by something like memory pressure from Chrome (Vivaldi) which I use for hours a day on KZbin...

[@MarkPayneAudio]

You are. Keep and eye on writes fro the Kernel_task. Thats managing memory pressure if you have it.

[@andrejpaskalev2617]

13-inch, M1, 2020, 16GB RAM, 1TB SSD Creation date of my home dir 6 Feb 2021 (753 days old), written 506T 506 000 / 753 = 671GB Looks like I'm over .3. Now I have to watch it again because I didn't catch the part how much longer should this shit last. And I think I do nothing too crazy with my mac. I work as web developer, all those writes are from reinstalling node_modules, switching postgres dumps and having multiple tabs open in 2 browsers.

[@phopetindall]

I'm quite concerned. Just standard usage and I'm getting >1TB/day :-( Seems to drop drastically if I close Chrome. I'm on Big Sur.

[@krosser2123]

I can see that you also use OneDrive there. So, it looks like that non native app doesn't really impact the SSD, which is good to know. 👍

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Yes I have two OneDrive accounts syncing. Don't let anyone persuade you that Rosetta apps cause swapping per se. Bad apps cause swapping!

[@nellwackwitz]

@@MarkPayneAudio You totally rock! Because of this issue, I saved up and got the 1 TB version of the MacBook Air, and I've stopped using Chrome and non-native Adobe apps. There are plenty of MAC alternatives.

[@Custard_Pie]

Wow, great video. Loving the depth of your understanding!

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Glad it was helpful!

[@mario9775]

Question!! 🇨🇴 Would you recommend the M1 air 16gb for ableton or save more money to get the M1 pro 16gb ? Is it worth it? Thank you so much, love your vids 🙌🏻🙌🏻🔥🔥

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Yes the 16GB Air is a good choice here.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Do watch the review where I discuss Air vs Pro.

[@elradmanafov9822]

This video is awesome. Thanks a lot for a great work! Subscribed 🤝

[@romandulce999]

My M1 MBP 16/512gb managed to swap 4.5tb in 10 day of work in Lightroom from an external drive... Not a very good perspective...

[@dirtyharry1881]

Hi and thank you for this video! Since I myself will be using my macbook air for some audio (16GB Ram / 256 SSD) can you describe a little what kind of usage have you been doing since you bought it? Edit: Something to consider: an SSD where the OS and all programs reside does not actually have the nominal space: for a 256GB your calculations should probably factor in the availability of 'disk' space which would be at best 180 GBs.

[@MarkPayneAudio]

This is why I would specify at least 512GB SS personally. I feel 256GB is a bit tight. If you watch my other videos in the playlist you will get a good feel as to my usage of the system.

[@dirtyharry1881]

@@MarkPayneAudio "I feel 256GB is a bit tight". Yup! Well, I'm afraid I already bit that bullet, cause I had the opportunity to buy it at a discount. And tbh I found hard to invest more money on this new machines that noone knows if they're actually built to last. Apple's silence on the matter of swap memory does not inspire any confidence...

[@ΚωστήςΔρόσος]

Thank you very much for all the information! I want to get a macbook air 16gb / 256 gb and I was concerned... But since I'm not into technology... What if the intergraded ssd fails ? Will I be able to start the system from an external ssd considering I already downloaded the operating system ?

[@MarkPayneAudio]

Well you could do that but it would be a pain (boot from external drive). Integrated SSD failure is very unlikely. If this worries you then buy apple care with the system and then sell the system second hand after 3 years. As I said ... these failures are very unlikely.

[@ΚωστήςΔρόσος]

@@MarkPayneAudio thanks for your answer! i had a hard disk failure and i guss i left with a trauma hehehe