Apple M1 SSD Lifespan - Should we worry about the SWAPPING?

Hey great video!, I'm using MAC mini M1 machines and notebooks. Very efficient architecture. What i do in my case (music production, and video editing some times) My working drive is an external SSD and also my cold storage is external. So i use internal ssd just for OS and apps and memory swap, all caching from my apps are located in the external drives. Running in the smaller config Apple offers for the M1 generation is a very good experience, for the specifications I did not expect such a great performance.

No idea how much time the drives will last but i did notice some optimizations made by Apple over the time using OS UPdates. Memory consumption become very predictable. If you are going to manage huge projects i recommend going for more memory. Apple Mini M1 was in a point the most efficient and powerful computer per watt i ever had on my desk and that's very impressive.

As i work in the Datacenter and Cloud industry for 25 years i did try everything in terms of hardware, in storage i test many brands and tech, i don't spect the ssd's to last so much , we will see. Just backup your data on daily basis :D Thank you for sharing! best regards from Santiago Chile!.

Can I buy 32gb MBP and disable swap file? (and all browsers disk caching) Or do I need at lease 64gb RAM to do this?

will running macOS from external drive can resolve memory swap issue?

I just bought a second hand MacBook air m1 that have 210 TB byte written already. And i saw that most of 256 gb ssd only have lifecycle of 150 TBW. So what should i do? What is the write cycle of the mac m1 air 256?

I have had my 1tb 16gb MacBook Air for nearly 2 years now and smartctl is still saying that my Percentage Used is 0%, according to this I have only written 3.65 TB of data in that time. One of the main reasons I got the 16 GB model is reduce wear and tear on the SSD, given this, this laptops ssd should last 100 years or more! :) Im a happy Chappy…

This problem should not occur with the Mac Studio because its SSDs are socketed. No one knows how to buy these proprietary Apple SSDs. However, presumably Apple could easily replace your Mac Studio SSD if this problem occurred.

It'd be nice if this was revisited though, everyone made their videos on it a year ago and now everyone's onto the new macs. :/

Big Sur is seeming to be a large problem with swap being used all the time even when you have left over ram wether you have 8 or 16 gigs but Monterey does things different and I have yet to ever see swap being used at all on my 8 gig air or 16 gig mini m1 systems so I would recommend everyone doing these videos start with installing a fresh copy of Monterey as Big Sur on m1s seem to have a problem where as on the intel Mac systems Big Sur is fine just as Monterey is fine on both intel and m1 Mac systems

Excellent breakdown with figures and logical approach. Thank you sir! I've been on the fence about buying an M1, but this video has helped a lot.

SSD failure is something I read about all the time but I never had SSD fail on me last 10 years I have used them. Regular spinning hard drives failed me many times but not SSDs.

Great explanation on the SSD swapping issue. One question - does larger RAM say from 8GB to 16GB cut down or eliminate swapping?

Well what if you boot from an external and then run exclusively on that? will that keep the built-in SSD pristine and you can keep going and going and going?

Great video Sir, thank you!

My M1 MBA is a year old, used constantly for video and animation and the SSD is 99% = practically as new. It only has 8GB of ram so the SSD is in constant use. It's not a problem

Great, I just bought my m1 MacBook Pro

Long story short - more RAM will assist the longevity of your SSD drive 👍

SSDs have a lifespan of 100 years compared to 5 years of HDDs

Thanks!

in the title wdym we? i dont buy overpriced shit

So glad I stumbled upon your channel! Keep up the M1 Content please!

You should work on making your, otherwise excellent, videos more concise and direct! Cheers.

For me: user removable RAM and SSD or GTFO

this would never have been a problem had Apple decided to use a swappable SSD.
they already charge a thieving amount for their storage and storage upgrades which puts them right up with enterprise grade SLC drives if not more expensive.

And it is more of a problem for an average consumer since they generally want to buy a product and keep it for as long as possible while a professional user knows about this stuff (most likely) and their work would warrant and allow for a repeated expense.

Save you all time... no.

cool calm and informative - subbed :)

One other point - when the SSD does fail, your m1 macbook is bricked.

The problem with these m1 macs is that they are advertised towards enthusiasts not casuals... Its entire page is dedicated to just how much faster it is than prior macs for Final Cut pro and so on.

Also even with 16GB the swaps are still drastically higher than Intel based macs from the past.

I guess we will see how things turn out, it would be nice if Apple just came out and told us what the TBW is for these drives.

I plan on getting a base m1 air just for photo editing, fingers crossed it lasts longer than 2 years which is what people fear the base models will start to die out with professional daily work.

The biggest problem I have with this is, why can't we replace the SSD? The enclosure of the M1 Mini has more space than ever.
Despite the greenwashing, they are not environmentally friendly at all.

You are assuming that disk writes are caused by user activity it is not always the case some standard known run away processes like lsd, mds, scheduld.... do a lot writes for no sane reason. The problem is Big Sur has no pacing controls on processors so they run at max speed with no restriction on a fast M1 this could create lots of writes before any swapping. Big Sur needs an upgrade to pace its run away processors but I don't think Apple cares it will sell lots of replacement Macs

Is Swapping not a standard process with Windows since decades? Why being so angry with Apples Unix adaption? SSDs are built of cheaper and cheaper TLC and QLC cells. But with internal tricks and reserved 15% for died cells, hides this problems. You go and buy 1024 GB or 1 TB and do get 831 GB inside the PC. 85 GB are missing.

What I refuse to accept is the idea of having a perfect machine unusable after about 5 years just because my soldered SSD died, partly for Apple's decision to overload the drive. This planned obsolescence is going way too far.

so is 5 years considered normal lifespan of the macbook now? Should it really be capped by SSD drive because Apple decided they do not want to mess with normal m.2 connector?
well, sure this is what apple wants us to believe. however, there are millions of laptops older than 5 years on the repair market. HDD failure is the most common issue on all laptops older than 5 years but it can be easilly replaced and the device will work absoultely fine, not only fine but also much faster compared to its original day-1 condition. It is not mid-2000s now, so sofware updates dont turn your device into a slow piece of garbage - macbook pro 15 " 2012 with i7 processor and SATA SSD drive performs absolutely comparable to the modern machines for most tasks excluding video editing which is also clearly being moved to the online services for normal users now. You can take last pre-touchbar macbook, install a m.2 NVME gen.4 4xPCI-E drive and it will work faster as if it was new, equipped with original Apple SSD drive. This is 7 year old machine which performs absolutely fine. If you take the MacBook pro 2016, there is a whole different story: you cant upgrade it, and it is already past "5 years" ssd lifespan. In 4 years, buying a 10 year old macbook will be complete lottery, since failing SSD might instantly loose its firmware and be completely unrecovarable with all your data in it. Yep, even dude with PC3000 or more advanced software wont be able to read it because its Apple. Well, it will still be dead because of Flexgate, but Logicboard itself is now simply a ticking bomb with a timer set to SSD lifespan.

this is why on my PC i bought a simple 500GB 7200rpm sata HDD, and adjusted my cache files on Windows via mlink command to be written to the HDD instead of my nvme SSD, preserving it`s livespan to it`s optimal potential.

apple is a fucking rip-off.... apple m1 can't even handle multi-monitor support, i have absolutely zero faith anymore in their other hardware.

As a collector of vintage Apples, I have working computers between 10 and 40 (!) years old. Some of these machines were well used before I acquired them and required replacement drives, etc., to restore them to working order. I worry that in the coming years, well-loved vintage Apples from the 2020s onward will be irreparable junk, victims of their disposable design. It is unconscionable but not especially surprising that a company that boasts its commitment to the environment builds machines that have a fixed lifespan (measured in TBW) and there’s nothing that can be done to extend it.

It is a serious problem. Why are they doing so?
I have 8GB of RAM and it starts writing to SSD when 5GB memory exceeds.
If it is affecting the lifespan of SSD.
Apple should fix this issue.

Apples' M1 is worse than buying a car that has an automatic engine explosion when there's a tire blowout.
Apples' M1 is like buying said car with an onboard GPS that redirects you onto roads with a high risk of nails.

hah, yeah I've seen people who replace their macs every year or so. O o

I still want a psion / diamond mako 🤦🏾‍♂️

Soldering on an ssd is like welding in spark plugs for your car

Do you know if when coming to the end of the ssd's life will it continue working will less space as the transistors die or does the ssd stop working suddenly

I gladly gonna sub to you, easy and non pushy biased informations. Thanks again

TRUTH ABOUT THE HIGH SWAP: The reason behind high swap memory on m1 is because of web-based client apps. These apps are built on chromium which Rosetta is used to translate, even if the app itself supports m1. These apps can chew up memory. Examples of these web-based clients are discord, WhatsApp, Spotify and etc. There might be a patch in the future to resolve this issue.

This channel is good because Europeans are mature people while Americans are childish. The concept of "maturity" and "immaturity" is one people should need to start addressing when describing a performance. Look at the news in the U.S. they look like meant for 9 years old. Then look at the news in Germany or England, you can tell they are more elegant and to the point.

very helpful

I set my windows paging to 16mb. Used to set it to none but I can't any more on my system drive. I also put all my profile data in an external hard disk. And link all the log files to it.

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.

Its really simple, dont buy Apple, your being ripped off