Hacker News Reader

Comment by muppetman | Hacker News Reader

Can't this easily be a userspace app overwriting a logfile or something thousands of times over? Spotify is rebuilding a cache in the background every minute, or some audio editing app misuses a sqlite database and it's writing the same stuff every second etc?

Any app/program can write to the disk. Why this is being framed as a hardware/OS error?

View on HN

The problem is that the ssd is not replaceable and people are saying the main cause of this heavy writing is the swapping to disk. So a hardware/OS problem.

I think it wouldn't get a lot of attention if the ssd could be replaced.

This isn't a correct statement, I think what you mean is it isn't user replaceable. Take one to Apple who can and does replace these due to failure through their service program. Outside warranty you will of course be paying for that.

They're not meaningfully replaceable without paying apple a lot of money for an ssd, assuming you're out of warranty, hastening planned obsolescence. How's that?

People understand apple can replace them. Nobody wants to pay apple to replace an ssd.

Apple can't though. It's soldered to the motherboard, so replacement also involves replacing the CPU and ram. Suddenly a $50 part has turned into about $500 (or $1000 with apple price gouging on ram and storage prices).

More likely that apple will just price gouge on a motherboard replacement and just trash the old one. And of course, they will do this only after attempting to upsell the user on an entirely new system.

It reeks of shade to intentionally grenade the hardware just to get more door traffic at retail locations.

> It reeks of shade to intentionally grenade the hardware just to get more door traffic at retail locations

Apple already forces owners of "vintage" MBPs to come in to a store for repair (or repair-related warranty) work, even if the failing component is identical to that of a non-vintage model. You'd think they would prefer to send those devices in to a repair depot with lots of inventory for older parts, but now that you mention it I guess they figured out that foot traffic converts into sales at a non-zero rate.

Every part of this is a made-up, unsupported, bad-faith, outright lie. No part of this is “more likely” based on my 30 years of experience of actually dealing with Apple. What’s actually more likely, in my experience, is Apple going above and beyond to cover repairs, even out of warranty, for issues that are even partially their fault.

“Attempting to upsell” doesn’t pass the laugh test. And it’s incredibly crass and irresponsible of you to toss around words like “intentionally grenade the hardware” without the slightest hint of evidence.

> Every part of this is a made-up, unsupported, bad-faith, outright lie. No part of this is “more likely” based on my 30 years of experience of actually dealing with Apple. What’s actually more likely, in my experience, is Apple going above and beyond to cover repairs, even out of warranty, for issues that are even partially their fault.

You are engaging in projection.

> “Attempting to upsell” doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Then there should be no reason to force the user to come in to a retail shop to get approved repairs on their machines then, and apple can save lots of money by going to mail-in repairs.

> And it’s incredibly crass and irresponsible of you to toss around words like “intentionally grenade the hardware” without the slightest hint of evidence.

There's hundreds of examples in this thread alone.

No, I'm not projecting. No, Apple doesn't "force" anyone to come into retail shops; that is simply false. You can mail hardware in. Some people aren't near an Apple Store.

And no, there are zero examples in this thread of any evidence that Apple has intentionally harmed its own hardware.

So you are batting 0 for 3.

To support your thought -- https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/11/for-f...

Since it's not happening to everyone (check the original twitter thread), I'm 100% sure it's third party apps writing in small 4kb chunks with O_DIRECT file opened, therefore creating write amplification effect where 4kb write becomes SSD block size write (for example 4mb), therefore one 4kb write per second, instead of being 0.3GB/day, becomes 345.6GB/day.

Can you explain this more? I always thought writes were by the page and erases were by the block, so the scenario you're describing would only be likely with TRIM disabled and an awful garbage collection algorithm.

I could be wrong though because I don't understand the implications of O_DIRECT.

That's an interesting thought. Given the prevalence, I almost wonder if it's a bug in an upstream framework or maybe a crazy default only on M1 Mac's in some language.

Chrome would also be unsurprising. Theyre known for their memory churn already.

My first thought when reading about this is that logging gone awry is a very likely cause. Could be the OS itself or apps doing it, but in either case a fix should be pretty reasonable.

I think logging can't be a problem for recent NVMe SSD (but problem for small eMMC on cars).

Reminds me of this: https://appleinsider.com/articles/20/07/27/vmware-virtualbox...

> The engineer explains problem relates to a "regression in the com.apple.security.sandbox kext (or one of its related components)" in macOS 10.15.6. As part of the investigation, it was discovered com.apple.security.sandbox was allocating millions of blocks of memory containing just the text "/dev" and no other data.

> Why this is being framed as a hardware/OS error?

Because this error closely matches the new Tesla hardware replacement (MCU mmc is not a "wear item" or not, depending on who you ask) and like that chip, the M1 also has non-replaceable parts which seem to be wearing faster than normal.

Maybe they transitioned from an earlier MacBook and feel like they are running the same apps? Though, of course, new architecture means that's a bad assumption.

I suppose it could be Mail, Spotify, iCloud, or anything really. But if its happening on all the new M1 macs, what do you think the common denominator is?

If you follow the original twitter thread - https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1364409829788250113 - you'll find that it's not affecting all M1 macs, and affects many intel macs, therefore it's almost guaranteed to be third party app's behaviour (writing 4kb chunks with O_DIRECT will lead to SSD write amplification)

I think Spotify insist on using 10% of my drive. I can’t configure it as far as I know (any more). The only solution that I know of is `rm -rf <cache>`.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com