#Macbook check ssd health install#
#Macbook check ssd health professional#

It also isn't clear if the system on a chip and combined caching on the M1 is causing the SMART reporting tools to display incorrect data.” However, the results from the tool may not necessarily be accurate, due to consistent problems with SMART reporting in general. It is likely that if there were better SMART reporting tools available, rather one that required installation and running it from the terminal, there would be a better picture of the current situation.

#Macbook check ssd health install#

“For a start, the lack of decent SMART reporting in macOS itself led users to install tools like Smart Monitoring Tools. For example, AppleInsider has queried the reliability of the data… Since publishing this article, we have learnt that there may be some problems with the data acquired by users, on which they are basing their concerns. UPDATE: Questions Raised About the Accuracy Of The Data There are suggestions that it could be because the M1 chip uses the SSD as virtual RAM, which requires a lot of data swapping or it is a bug in macOS Big Sur. Possible CausesĪt the time of writing the causes for this excessive wear on M1 Mac’s SSDs is unknown.

This is usually expected to be In the vast majority of cases, this typically is years or even a decade of use by most users.

SSDs potential lifespan is often measured by Terabytes Written (TBW), referring to how much data can be written to a drive, as set by the manufacturer before they consider that it could become unusable. What makes this even more of a problem is that the internal storage of Apple’s M1 Macs is soldered to the logic board, which could mean a significant repair bill for the user, where it could be necessary to replace the logic board or worse, just because the SSD has worn out. Multiple writes wear down the cells to a point where they don't hold a charge and it is this that causes the drive to fail. This is because each time a cell is written to, it has to first be erased and then the new data, written. There is a limit to the number of times each cell used to store data, can only be written to, before it fails. The problem originates from the way SSDs are designed and work. What this means is that the more you write data to an SSD, the shorter its lifespan will be before it starts to become unreliable and eventually fail. The most severe cases have 'consumed' about 10-13% of the maximum warrantable TBW value of the SSDs (given their capacity & using values for equivalent market-available NVMe drives).”Įven though SSDs are chips rather than mechanical parts, SSDs do have a finite lifespan and that is based on the amount of reading and writing of data they are asked to do.

#Macbook check ssd health professional#

“Some more professional users of the new M1 Macbooks are experiencing extremely high drive writes over relatively short time. The macOS shows that the internal SSD of these M1 Macs has reported: “extremely high drive writes over a relatively short time.” In an extreme case, one user reports that their SSD has already had consumed about 13% of the maximum warrantable total bytes written.