Interesting SSD wear rate - Mac Pro

Pretty interesting. I've owned my laptop for just shy of two years and use it daily. Have a Wd sn520 (oem Wd blue but the exact same) 512gb. I had both cdi and Wd dashboard but uninstalled so I reinstalled both just now to check and only have 6.8tb written on crystal disk info and states 97% health left in the Wd dashboard so I ain't worried. The health is like an olm using distance or in an ssds case the as a main variable in determining life. And even if it was at 50% I wouldn't care. Ssds can go several times over their tbw until they start dying and reallocating bad sectors. Tlc drives typical go 4x the rated pe cycles.
 
What brand of SSD do you have? Most of the well known OEM's have their own utility that will show you that information. It would be interesting to see if that statistic varies between Crystal Disk and that utility. I'll check on my son's rig in a little bit for S&G's, his is a SanDisk, it's showing 94% in the WD utility.
Could be that Crystal Disk Info doesn't report SSD life accurately on my SSD. I couldn't find a SSD utility from the SSD maker.

Crystal Disk Info also say "Available Spare Threshold" is 50%, and "Available Spare" is 100%. Not sure exactly what the means.

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I use Firefox regularly, in fact I have it open right now. At any one time I'm running three browsers on this box: Chrome, Firefox and Brave with a combined total of 51 tabs open.

@bunnspecial's issue seemed to revolve around too much swapping, thrashing the disk. He had wanted an M1 with more than 8GB of RAM and of course it isn't user expandable.
I would assume it is fixed by now. Firefox would write like .5 TB to 1TB a day something way nuts. This was like 2 months ago, but they just killed the M1's wear block cache stash.


Here it is......

 
BTW - my laptop has 16 GB of RAM, and the RAM never really gets above 60-65% used in real time (watching Task Manager). So I would think my machine isn't doing a lot of swap file action. Yet, my SSD life decrease rate seems pretty high (5% uses in 15 months).
I think his rate is higher than that? I haven't checked my MBP SSD, but it's a 2014 vintage notebook with 16GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD, would be interesting to see what it shows.
 
I would assume it is fixed by now. Firefox would write like .5 TB to 1TB a day something way nuts. This was like 2 months ago, but they just killed the M1's wear block cache stash.


Here it is......


Would what Firefox was doing also affect all SSDs regardless of brand ?

I've been tracking the SSD read and write data from Crystal Disk Info, and looks like the read and write weelky values are at a pretty consistant rate.

Think I'll use Edge or Chrome instead of Firefox for a few weeks and see if the read and write rates change.
 
I would assume it is fixed by now. Firefox would write like .5 TB to 1TB a day something way nuts. This was like 2 months ago, but they just killed the M1's wear block cache stash.


Here it is......



Important when using utilities that aren't manufactured by the OEM, they may yield VERY different figures. For example, we know my "life remaining" from the manufacturer, as that's in the OP of this thread, however DriveDx shows a much more optimistic lifetime of 98%:

Screen Shot 2021-06-12 at 6.13.29 PM.png


Also, my age of the drive is wrong. I must have cloned it (I thought I did a fresh install) because I just found the order receipt and it was March 22nd, 2017, so the drive is 4 years and a few months old. This corresponds properly with the on time of 4 years, 12 days and 8 hours, as this computer is almost never off.
 
Somewhat OT, but my storage drive, an old WD 1TB unit, has been online for 83,202 hours, which yields a warning. That's more than 9 and a half years, pretty impressive, it has no SMART errors at all and 797 power cycles.
 
Lite-on I believe.
Yeah, looks like that's now morphed into SSST Corp:

They unfortunately don't seem to offer the same level of support as the traditional OEM's.
 
Thanks for the report on that.

Out of curiosity, and I'm guessing you did but I'll ask to make sure, did you enable TRIM? If it's not an Apple OEM drive, it has to be enabled manually.

We'll see if the M1 wear issue gets "fixed" as claimed with 11.4.

BTW, in all the reports of the issue, I haven't seen it specifically tied to Firefox. Firefox does seem to hit my RAM hard, but it's far from the only thing.
 
So does anyone know if the SSD gets a heavy amount if reads/writes when things like watching YouTube or doing live video streaming - buffering to the SSD? What's causing the high level of reads/writes? Is all data coming in and going out via Wi-Fi being buffered on the SSD?

Seems like just reading and writing everyday files like Excel, Word, jpg, gifs, etc wouldn't amount to an average of ~130 GB reads and ~130 GB writes in a week's time - that's what my SSD is averaging over the last 15 months since new. The reads and writes are basically the same on my laptop's SSD.

Another thing is doing back-ups or an ISO image of the SSD to an external drive would also tax the SSD. Something I've done a few times.
 
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Thanks for the report on that.

Out of curiosity, and I'm guessing you did but I'll ask to make sure, did you enable TRIM? If it's not an Apple OEM drive, it has to be enabled manually.

We'll see if the M1 wear issue gets "fixed" as claimed with 11.4.

BTW, in all the reports of the issue, I haven't seen it specifically tied to Firefox. Firefox does seem to hit my RAM hard, but it's far from the only thing.
Yes, trimforce for the win, lol.
 
Yes, trimforce for the win, lol.

I figured you knew, but wanted to make sure!

Back in the day, I bought a little widget called Trim Enabler that made it easy on versions prior to 10.11? or whenever it was that Apple added the handy little trimforce command to terminal.

Now it's a moot point since Apple computers don't even HAVE user serviceable drives. Back when I still had my 2015 Retina, I had a 512gb Apple blade in it. My wife was getting frustrated with her 128gb Air drive being full, so I took that as an excuse to buy a 1tb EVO 960 for my Retina. I cycled the 512gb drive from it down into her AIr, and fortunately she's happy with that.

I should check the drive health in my old 15" 2012. I had a 1tb Samsung EVO 850 that I put in it I think around 2016, and then put a 2tb spinner into it later(I cycled the SSD over to the optical bay since it doesn't have an SMS and on that generation is the same speed bus as the boot drive). I really miss having 3tb of storage onboard.
 
Would what Firefox was doing also affect all SSDs regardless of brand ?

I've been tracking the SSD read and write data from Crystal Disk Info, and looks like the read and write weelky values are at a pretty consistant rate.

Think I'll use Edge or Chrome instead of Firefox for a few weeks and see if the read and write rates change.
I know when my iMac finally gets made next month, I will be checking the about:config settings in Firefox the first day. It is a Apple M1 thing from what I read.
 
Most of the well known OEM's have their own utility that will show you that information. It would be interesting to see if that statistic varies between Crystal Disk and that utility.
Sadly, Samsung Magician doesn't show a % health figure for my 850 EVO drive. It just says "Good."

CrystalDiskInfo shows 96%. The drive is about 5 years old, maybe 6.

RaVCHoJ.png



Here is an older 840 EVO drive from my home media server (Intel NUC running Ubuntu) which is on 24x7x365. Notice the power-on hours, which would be roughly 10 years, but that seems off. I bought this drive new in 2014, so that's not technically possible.

pVnakua.png
 
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Sadly, Samsung Magician doesn't show a % health figure for my 850 EVO drive. It just says "Good."

CrystalDiskInfo shows 96%. The drive is about 5 years old, maybe 6.

RaVCHoJ.png



Here is an older 840 EVO drive from my home media server (Intel NUC running Ubuntu) which is on 24x7x365. Notice the power-on hours, which would be roughly 10 years, but that seems off. I bought this drive new in 2014, so that's not technically possible.

pVnakua.png

Yeah, unless the drive shipped used or with that value pre-populated?
 
Old drives are being sold as new? This would be OEM to the computer OEM, not saying that it isn't--I was wondering if that was the case--just that one would hope that this wouldn't be happening...

Yeah, unless the drive shipped used or with that value pre-populated?

I just checked Crystal Disk and it says my 5 yo laptop has been powered on for 3194 hours, the equivalent of 133 days. I keep it on almost 24x7, I will power down for a very occasional trip out of town but that's about it and then when I get where I'm going it goes back on again. I think the numbers are screwed up. There's no way it could only have been on for that short a period of time.

Shoot. Now it makes me suspect the 100% Good health status it gave my drive. :(
 
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Old drives are being sold as new? This would be OEM to the computer OEM, not saying that it isn't--I was wondering if that was the case--just that one would hope that this wouldn't be happening...



I just checked Crystal Disk and it says my 5 yo laptop has been powered on for 3194 hours, the equivalent of 133 days. I keep it on almost 24x7, I will power down for a very occasional trip out of town but that's about it and then when I get where I'm going it goes back on again. I think the numbers are screwed up. There's no way it could only have been on for that short a period of time.

Shoot. Now it makes me suspect the 100% Good health status it gave my drive. :(

Did you see the huge difference between the health figures I pulled from DriveDx vs the OEM utility? There's definitely an issue with relying on some of these figures from non-OEM software, which is really unfortunate.
 
Wait until the drive throws a predictive failure then you can swap it for a new one under warranty.

When I maintained older SAN's part of my duty was working with the vendor to get drives swapped out with predictive failure.
 
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