M1 Mac users report excessive SSD consumption

Over the past week, some M1 Mac users have been reporting alarming SSD health readings, suggesting that these devices write a lot of data towards the drivers. aca (through iMore).

For Twitter and the MacRumors forums, users report that ‌M1‌ Macs experience very high writes over a short period of time. In the most seemingly tough cases, ‌M1‌ Macs are said to spend as much as 10 to 13 percent of the total write warranty (TBW) worth of an SSD.

Flash memory on solid-state drivers, such as those used in Macs, cannot be written to multiple times before becoming unstable. Software ensures that the load is evenly distributed over the drive’s memory cells, but there is a point where the driver has been written to it so much that it can no longer hold data reliably. So while SSD consumption is normal, expected behavior, drivers should not be overwhelmed by the ability to store data as soon as some ‌M1‌ Mac appears to be.

One user showed that their Mac ‌M1‌ had already consumed one per cent of their SSD after just two months, and another ‌M1‌ Mac with a 2TB SSD had already consumed three per cent. The total data units written for these devices run into many terabytes, when they would normally be expected to be much lower.

The user with three percent usage profiteering that, if its device were a 256GB model, it could have used as much as 30 percent so far, and reached its highest TBW in about two years. An SSD can continue when its TBW limit is reached, but it is not known how long it will last beyond this point.

The extent of the TBW case is unknown, however reports SSD’s weird behavior is now emerging from users with Intel-based Macs, suggesting that the TBW issue may not be exclusive to ‌M1‌ Macs.

The reported wear and tear on some ‌M1‌ Macs is so severe that it appears to be the result of a beast rather than the expected behavior of the ‌M1‌ chip, but it is unclear whether the problem is related to erroneous readings or macOS actually writing a lot of data to the drive. Drive monitoring tools are sometimes unreliable and it seems that the issue can be resolved through an update to macOS Big Sur.