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Comment by yumraj | Hacker News Reader

Given his use case which involves massive video and photo editing, and the reports of excessive writes on the SSD in the M1s is it possible his SSD just reached EOL?

I don’t know what the symptoms of an SSD reaching EOL are, would it just stop responding at all?

I don’t think we still have heard anything from Apple about the massive SSD writes and that for me is the biggest concern before making an M1 based purchase.

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I’d be incredibly surprised if that was the case, even cheap budget SSDs have 500+ TBW ratings.

I’m amazed this person had 800GB of important data on a laptop and yet zero backups. Especially when a backup service like backblaze is $5 a month and you just set it up in 2 minutes and it runs on its own.

I am surprised this person had an encyclopedia and didn't Xerox it, leaving it on someone else's bookshelf.

Contrary to popular belief, not everyone reaches for someone else's computer to look after their important things.

Sad though it is that they learned their lesson the hard way, they can't really be faulted for it.

Nothing keeping you from using time machine with your own NAS or harddrive.

If there was 800GB of static data, it was almost full, so the wear-leveling process wouldn’t be optimal and it would write over a small part of the flash cells over and over. In that case you could exceed the program-erase lifetime, but not necessarily the TBW. We know the total TBW was high, though, so it was even more excessive.

From what I’ve read, Apple has fixed this problem in a recent Mac OS version. Apparently, it was a swapping bug.

Where did you read that it was fixed or acknowledged as a bug? It definitely was not fixed.

This thread: https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/ssd-swap-high-usage-of-...

Posters had narrowed down the excessive writes down by limiting memory usage, so they knew it was a swap problem, and some users said the latest OS fixed it. Now that I’ve checked it again, they’re saying it’s better but not fixed.

I believe that modern SSDs shuffle data around so that wear levelling does still work even with nearly full drives.

Its the difference between static and dynamic wear leveling. Static wear leveling will shuffle around the data in static blocks to even out the program-erase cycles.

SSDs that reach EOL should go into read only mode; not die.

Maybe it did. But it was the boot drive and soldered to the motherboard. So the OS would need to write to it and there’s no way to get the data off in a third-party manner. That’s kind of the big issue.

Do new macs not show the "sad mac" or "cross-eyed mac" if they can't read the boot drive?

That hasn't been a thing for a decade.

Do M1 Macs have user-facing drive health / write-count reports?

Yes, there are some reports, including some posts on HN itself, where people are seeing unusually high TBs of writes - most likely due to swap.

See this: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=m1+writes

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