If you have a new Mac you probably think it will last for years and years, but some new troubling data suggests it may not be. More than a few users report that SSDs on new M1 and Intel Macs may be overused by the system, causing them to wear out earlier than usual.
Twitter user @never_released started a thread showing a report of an M1 Mac with very high write counts for a computer only two months old. That prompted other M1 owners to run the same report, and many have also found overuse, including Macworld columnist And Moors
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Twitter In Moren’s comparison, his 2017 iMac records about 2.15 terabytes of data written every month for 14 percent of its life cycle, while the new M1 MacBook measures nearly 6 TB and has lost 1 percent as its expected lifespan. That may not seem like much, but if you extrapolate in the same time, the MacBook’s SSD can be used for 30 to 40 percent over the same period. Moren’s machine has 16 GB of RAM, so usage could be even higher for machines with 8 GB of RAM.
Other users have reported that Macs with Intel processors behave just as strangely, with one user reports a whopping 33 percent used after just 7 months.
SSDs are preferred over traditional hard drives because they are much faster, but SSDs have a limited lifespan. An SSD wears out every time you write to it, and eventually the drive will have problems and will likely need to be replaced. However, this should take several years, and macOS will spread the writing across an SSD to extend its lifespan. On the basis of these measurements, this can happen much earlier than expected.
To see your disk usage, you can download DriveDx, which offers a 2-week free trial. More advanced users can examine the health of their drive using smartmon tools and Terminal.
There may be an error in the reporting tool, but macOS is more likely to do something to the SSD to cause these spikes. If so, it’s a matter of concern because the SSD drives on most new Macs are not user-serviceable and cost hundreds of dollars to replace. In any case, this is clearly a software glitch that can be fixed with a future macOS update, but it has yet to reveal whether it’s a bug or a feature.
We’ve reached out to Apple for comment and will update this story if we hear anything.
Update 2/24: Added more information about the issue and how to check your SSD usage on your Mac.