M1 mac excessive ssd wear issue

The fact that SSDs are not immortal, they do have a life span, current estimation of the age limit for SSDs are around 10 years, although the average SSD lifespan could be shorter. in real life age of an SSD can be a primary determinant when it stopped working properly.

When you buy your new shiny high-performance piece of metal M1 apple silicon powered MacBook-air, MacBook-pro, or mac-mini, they do get performance from these blazing fast SSD - solid-state drives, these SSD dies of wear and no exception for apple products. these SSDs can only be written a certain number of times before they become unstable.

Here are numerous reports from M1 Mac users worrying about hard drive health reports which could indicate SSD's severe life span issues.

Source: @david_rysk

The issue of 'Percentage Userd` refers to the lifespan of an SSD.

2TB 16GB model. 3% used in just 2 months !

That means that for a 256GB model, proportionally, you'd expect ~30% usage. If this is accurate, some of these machines aren't going to last half a year to 100%.

And that's a 16GB model. 8GB should be worse.

Some cases have "consumed" about 10-13% of the maximum warrantable TBW value of the SSDs so far.

Some of them worried that their M1 Mac has already consumed 1% of its SSD after just two months The total data written is counted into many terabytes when normally it should be in gigabytes.

Source: @never_released

Professional users of the new M1 Macbooks could be experiencing extremely high drive writes over a relatively short time as they are working hours daily with BIG files and memory-heavy applications.

Available some user data suggests that write endurance ratings are not proportional to drive size.

So, 256GB model can use its SSD up to 100% in ~2y or less

These issues on some M1 Macs are s worse that it suggests that the problem is due to a bug rather than the M1‌ chip itself, for now, it is unclear if the problem is because of macOS genuinely writing huge amounts of data to the drive or there is debug logs or bug.

Maybe tools used to monitoring SSD usage can be sometimes unreliable and the issue can likely be overcome via a new macOS operating system update.