Some Apple users of the current M1 Macs are worried that the Mac or macOS 11 Big Sur writes too much data to the SSD.
The discussion was initiated by Hector Martin on Twitter. He noticed that the statistics for his SSD showed a very high write value. Several TBW (terabytes written) are shown for a few months of usage – these values should normally only occur after years. At the same time, the SSD’s consumption counter shows between 1 and 2%. With these values, the installed SSD would be broken after four to eight years. The current worst case is this one, which shows 10% consumption of the SSD lifetime after a few months.
Does Apple use the SSD as extended RAM?
Some theorize that macOS is constantly writing the swap file to the SSD because 8 or 16 GB is not enough for the system. Apple would then use the fast SSD as extended memory and consume it in the process. As this is normal, the amount of the written data is surprising. This would make the Mac unusable in a few years, since the internal SSD can no longer be replaced. You could only continue to use it with an external SSD.
However, it is not yet clear whether the program installed via homebrew reads the SSD’s data correctly, just as little is known about the SSD’s lifespan. Nevertheless, the high write rates in such a short time are surprising. We will continue to follow the topic and keep you up to date.
