Can we get out of the loop a little bit, and appreciate this guy's perfect verbal skills and nice pink shirt?

This channel is how I imagined the future would be when I was a kid. It’s such a refreshing change from the rest of the noise on KZfaq. I wish I lived in a PBS world. 😊

Why is there no EDM blasting and why are you not shouting and why are there no meme references every 2 seconds and why didn't you stretch the content out an extra few minutes to fit more ads?!?!? Subbed!!!

My M1 MBA is a year old, used constantly for video and animation and the SSD is 99% = practically as new. It only has 8GB of ram so the SSD is in constant use. It's not a problem

Congratulations on reaching 10K! You deserve it, you put out consistently high quality, formative videos.

An excellent, thoughtful video. So refreshing to have someone who makes KZfaq videos on M1 Macs that don't involve hype, yelling, or constant sarcasm. Thank you.

Something to consider: the amount of data that you write to memory doesn't fully reflect the amount of writing to the SSD that occurs. The way that a SSD works is that it only writes individual ones or zeros. It initializes large areas of memory to one or the other and when it needs to write to an individual memory location, it flips the bits that are not already the correct value. Changing just one bit in memory could require resetting multiple bytes and rewriting all of it to the correct value.

I bought my MBP Retina 2012 - the first retina generation with 512 SSD... Use it every day, just normal user, not heavy. Sometimes dealing with big files... There we are in 2021 and still running with no issues. But anyways regularly do my Time Machine backup, just in case...

Interesting video and very thought provoking, thank you. My wife has been using a MacBook Air since 2011 without issue. I've even installed the latest supported Mac OS on it. My daughter has just purchased a MacBook Air with an M1 chip - largely on my recommendation and the experience her mother has had with her laptop. With over 30 years in IT the SSD lifespan has been something that has concerned me, especially now the SSD is not changeable within Apple devices. She at least followed the advise the advise I gave her and that you have stated here, in respect to getting the 16Gb version and the largest SSD she could afford for that reason. Storage wise a lot of people will recommend you rat tail it with external devices and that's a fair point and a good cost saving but she needed it to be relatively portable without the hassle of extra devices. Coupled with cloud backup. It will be interesting to see how the device performs over the coming years. Fingers crossed it will be no less reliable as my wife's.

Really like the way you explain everything !! thanks :D

I wish there were more tech KZfaq channels like this one. Sensible and we'll researched information delivered in a simple and down to earth way. Keep up the good work.

It's a pleasure watching your videos.

Thank you once again for the informative and very thorough videos. I purchased my first Mac computer a Mac mini M1 this past December and I keep my computers on average of 8 to 10 years so it was very important to me to know that whichever device I decided to buy it would last for many years. I decided to go with the 16 GB of RAM and a 256 GB hard drive mainly because ram was the primary concern to me and I honestly do believe that there are much faster external SSDs that are on the horizon. Your videos have been a tremendous resource for me..... Definitely worth a sub!

Thanks for the reassuring video. I intend to keep my M1 MacBook Pro for a little longer than five years, as I have with the machine it replaces, a mid-2012 MacBook Air. Looks like, with the spec I chose -16GB/512GB-, I'll be fine for a long time. Perfect.

This was extremely informative. Thanks for sharing this. I was worried and was frequently checking swap usages on my M1.

I'm watching your video on a 2012 MacBook Pro. 5 years of life is what I expect out of cheap OEMs, not Apple. Notably, I have replaced both the RAM and the drive in this machine, however the lack of ability to do this with the newer hardware is a reason that I will be taking a rather wait and see approach. Furthermore, this lack of ability to replace parts which fail is a reason that I can't imagine I will buy anything as high end as what I'm using from Apple again. If I'm going to pay top end prices, I expect to get top end lifespans. Suggesting that "normal" users don't even use their computers every day is not a convincing argument to me as that could not apply to me less... Maybe they're release something in their Mac Pro that's no so completely disposable.

The sheer politeness and articulateness of the request for subscription had me subscribing and looking for a second thumbs up button.

Simple answer if you use data is plug an external drive in and keep your document video or whatever large data files you have on it. It's alot easier to replace

In summer 2013 I put a OCZ Vertex 4 into my 2009 Macbook Pro 15", the Macbook and SSD are still going on strong. And I used to use it heavily with VMware Fusion.

The very best channel of tech stuff. On the point and no obsessive repeating of facts to extend the video play time. ❤️

You are the real example to show how to explain the technical things. So called Tech KZfaqrs don't have one percent of knowledge what you are sharing with us. Kindly keep up.

For a lot of users it could be a problem, as many reported already. For example: My Macbook already written more than 60TB, in 2 months!!! And I am having at least 2% lifespan usage. So far I have these observations: If my swap is around 300-500MB (or maybe under 1GB) everything is ok and the kernel_task is writing normal amount of data, but if swap is more than 0.5-1GB kernel_task is writing few GBs per minute (approx. 2TB in day). And it is doing with all apps (Lightroom, Chrome, Photoshop, or even with emptying Trash can, etc.). I can run Lightroom with no issues in those "green" levels of swap memory, but the GPU acceleration must be off. Doing Photoshop work is heavy and swap memory is in usage and kernel_task is writing like crazy. The worst is that after swap memory once jumps above those 0.5-1GB and you quit those Apps that turned swap up the problem continues (swap is in high numbers and kernel is crazy). Now I am looking for option to clear my swap with some magic trick (command "sudo purge" in Terminal is not working so far for me). Let me know if you figured something or you have similar observations as mine. (MB Pro M1 16GB ram and 1TB disk)

With a 256gb apple drive, with trim, the less of that drive you have filled up, the longer your SSD will last. Use thunderbolt external storage for photos, apps, downloads, and basically all directories and your internal soldered down SSD chip will last a lot longer. The difference in life expectancy by keeping 20% free disk space vs 10% disk space is huge. Also its easier to upgrade to new tech with an externally mapped thunderbolt drive, the only TM backup to make is the OS and settings.

My 8/256 M1 mac mini has already 10.3 TBW in maybe...2/3 months? Only watch youtube and some chrome/google suite apps. If the total lifespan is 150TBW. It seems only 2years to go....

Man, I really like you calm vibe in explaining these topic. Very knowledgeable!

Good video. I agree with your analysis. I've been using SSDs for 10 years and I have yet to see one fail. The first drive I bought was a Crucial M4 512GB in Sep 2012 for my mid-2009 Apple MacBook Pro 15. The MacBook Pro failed with a display fault in Dec 2019, but the SSD still works and is now being used as a file store. In contrast I've had several hard disk drives fail, along with couple of SD cards and USB drives. My favourite SSDs have always been Crucial, and I typically by their higher tier product with the better-quality NAND chips. They are not as fast as the higher-end Samsung drives, but they offer reliable performance Vs cost. I replaced the mid-2009 MacBook Pro with a four port 2019 MacBook Pro 13. The 2 TB SSD is extremely fast and I am sure it will still be working in 5 years+, though I suspect I will have made the switch to an Apple silicon Mac before then!

I have an Intel MacBook Pro 2015... now 2021 I figure that it will be a year or so away before I upgrade to a new machine. I don't think Apple would cheap out on the SSD either. However, that would limit the resale and vintage computer market as when the drive is "used up" then that will be it for the whole system. That said even 80GB / day is a lot (and I would suspect it would be much more). I am surprised at the amount of data I use when I let the activity monitor do it's job I would expect much more than 5 years for the drive.

i just got an M1, this did put me at ease, thanks!

Thank you for your unbiased insight in layman’s terms.

Thank you, sir. I'm looking at an M1 for music production. I'm using an iMac now, and it's working fine. But, it's now 5 years old, so I'm thinking ahead. So, your info was quite helpful. Congrats on the subs, you deserve them. Here's to many more!

Long story short, no you don't need to worry about swap memory shortening your SSD lifespan.

I'm glad youtube recommended me your videos. Your voice is very calming.

As a collector of vintage Apples, I have working computers between 10 and 40 (!) years old. Some of these machines were well used before I acquired them and required replacement drives, etc., to restore them to working order. I worry that in the coming years, well-loved vintage Apples from the 2020s onward will be irreparable junk, victims of their disposable design. It is unconscionable but not especially surprising that a company that boasts its commitment to the environment builds machines that have a fixed lifespan (measured in TBW) and there’s nothing that can be done to extend it.

I have an old ThinkPad T420S with a 160GB SSD. I bought it used like 4 years ago and it's perfectly fine even today, the SSD is still kicking. My M1 MacBook Pro is on its way, beacuse I want to do some heavier tasks, but its still nice to know I shouldn't be worried, because it's really expensive where I live, about 2260 dollars for the 512GB SSD and 16GB RAM version.

I have M1 Mac mini 16Gb/512Gb. Using it as a web bot 24/7 (Python+Selenium via Firefox). During 24h, it opens 21 parallel FirefoxCp's sessions (Intel architecture) 17 times, then around 1Gb is swapped out from RAM each time, means if Apple SSD 512Gb has the same 300TBW rating as Samsung ones, my M1 should last around 48 years. Think I will fade-out first rather than Apple SSD :D

I tried an SSD as swap and temp file storage for my Photoshop workstation, and killed it in 6 months, but while it worked, it was blazing fast.... I do sports action photography, so I come back with thousands of shots and even though probably 2/3rd of them are culled, I still have hundreds of large images to process every session, so image processing is a pretty extreme use case for SSD as you will want to max out the swap and also keep more temp and intermediate files for history effects, etc, so the drive will fill up and use up write cycles quickly.. Moral of the story though is to get the very largest SSD that you can with the least dense grouping, so that you maximize both the write count as well as the ability to leverage as much wear leveling as possible to extend drive life.. Also keep a close eye on the SMART parameters of the drive as the reallocation count going up gives you pretty advanced notice that your drive is beginning to exhaust write cycles on some of its cells...

M1 Mac with 16 gb ram shows zero swap usage even when playing multiple games on it and even if an app is left open for couple of days in the background it handles it really well left it on standby it has amazing battery life. Always have latest updates installed on your device and any bugs will be fixed automatically and go for the 16 gb variant if you’re using it for heavy tasks.

Perfect, concise explanation. I wish more channels were like this.

Great information to have in mind. I'm already using M1 Mac mini with basic config 8Gb 256 SSD and I'm a heavyweight user too. While in music production process I normally max out on most plugins in DAW and this machine just takes it on with bare sweat. Simply unbelievable performance. Just ordered 2TB SSD drive from Netac to put this in combination and take some weight of internals SSD processes so as soon as case from Orico arrives I will shift some stuff over. In comparison I was using very specked out Hackintosh I9 9900k overclocked to 5ghz with 970Evo plus 1TB from Samsung and this M1 just doing as good. So I'm really happy and can't wait to see what next generation of M's will offer :)

This is some concern I have in mind, thank you for reviewing it^^ keep it up sirs!

I’m fairly certain if you ask Louis Rossmann he would be able to tell you what SSD Apple is using.

Sponsored by Wondershare Recoverit How to recover data from SSD: bit.ly/3qGtwfl BEFORE YOU COMMENT: Please remember that this video was recorded prior to the current tech media attention on high data writes. For this video, some folks (including us) had noted that the M1 Macs use swap more than Intel Macs, particularly the 8GB version. There are obvious reasons for that. Naturally, we then question what impact this will have on SSD life, and THAT normal use case is the focus of this video. The separate high data writes issue is a different matter which affects an unknown percentage of M1 Macs (not ours), and also some Intel Macs. I’m preparing another video to address that separate issue and to start some data collection that may help us to identify the source of the fault. So, I’m not “dodging an issue” or presenting “out-of-date” information. I stand by the conclusions in this video for anyone who has an M1 Mac that isn’t exhibiting this separate fault. If you are seeing high usage and you are using your M1 Mac normally (i.e. you’re not trying to use an entry-level Mac with 8GB for heavy workloads like 4K video editing etc.), please share as much data as you can. Thanks everyone 😊

i’ve been watching some of your videos lately, and really been enjoying them, you earned a sub man, also why not try adding more graphic content, like images or other videos, it might make it easier for some to understand what your saying, really nice job : )

Just a quick note: do not use the Spotify app on macOS. That electron shit just eats your ssd lifespan by writing and deleting tons of cache

The problem is that my M1 MacBook writes more than 3 TB a day, so it looks like it won't last even two years.

The answer to your question can be found in early generation iPads and iPhones which uses early versions of the M1 SOC. The SSD's on these chips are different from ordinary SSD's in that they are part of the chip. I'm not aware of high failure rates of the SOC's on early iPads so I wouldn't worry too much as they all have less memory than typical PCs and do just fine. The point of failure is more likely to be the battery during the usable lifespan of the product rather than the SSD.

Very well explained! And your voice is soothing but not boring lol. Keep it up :)

I do worry about that, especially because I am daily heavy user... I will probably invest in the 16GB Air or wait for their newer pro models without the touchbar and with the good keyboard back.

well done sir. great voice modulation, great technical explanations

this is why on my PC i bought a simple 500GB 7200rpm sata HDD, and adjusted my cache files on Windows via mlink command to be written to the HDD instead of my nvme SSD, preserving it`s livespan to it`s optimal potential.

So glad I stumbled upon your channel! Keep up the M1 Content please!

We have to remember that this is a consumer product that any prospective owner will use for approximately 5-8 years. As the video says, the 16Gb M1's still SWAP, but not as much as the 8Gb. If people are using the 8Gb for web browsing/every day use which is not memory intensive then they probably won't have any issues. I'm sure that when the professional models of the M1 based Macs, whether they are M1X, M2 etc, they will have more memory (32Gb, 64Gb etc) and be less reliant upon SWAPPING. I'm sure that the SSD's will be fine.

I can’t believe you only have 10k subs.

Hey great video!, I'm using MAC mini M1 machines and notebooks. Very efficient architecture. What i do in my case (music production, and video editing some times) My working drive is an external SSD and also my cold storage is external. So i use internal ssd just for OS and apps and memory swap, all caching from my apps are located in the external drives. Running in the smaller config Apple offers for the M1 generation is a very good experience, for the specifications I did not expect such a great performance. No idea how much time the drives will last but i did notice some optimizations made by Apple over the time using OS UPdates. Memory consumption become very predictable. If you are going to manage huge projects i recommend going for more memory. Apple Mini M1 was in a point the most efficient and powerful computer per watt i ever had on my desk and that's very impressive. As i work in the Datacenter and Cloud industry for 25 years i did try everything in terms of hardware, in storage i test many brands and tech, i don't spect the ssd's to last so much , we will see. Just backup your data on daily basis :D Thank you for sharing! best regards from Santiago Chile!.

Thanks for running the numbers. Truth.

Perfect explanation! Thank you.

Exactly the thing me and my colleague were discussing 10 mins ago, and this video pops up. :)

I have a Mac Mini 16 gig. I surf the net. Email, and watch KZfaq videos mostly. I am always using about 8 gig of ram or more. I would highly recommend 16 gig of ram. It’s worth the money.

Great explanation on the SSD swapping issue. One question - does larger RAM say from 8GB to 16GB cut down or eliminate swapping?

I suspect that we are seeing the swap usage on the Apple Silicon now because the SOC is powering a computer with a desktop OS. iPad has probably been doing this for a long time which allows even the pro model to get away with just 6GB of ram. iPads last a very long time so if we assume that a Mac is using a higher quality flash storage in addition to the higher capacity, you have nothing to worry about.

One data point which is important is the fuller the drive the less available free space there is for wear leveling. So a drive which is very full will wear out much quicker! Best to leave at a minimum of 1/4 of the drive free for OS and app use for swapfile/page file, caching & app scratch space. Very well done otherwise!

Funny you should bring this up. I'm replacing a bunch of spinning drives in industrial PC's and I chose the Samsung 860 PRO drive. They are 2 bit MLC and they have double the TBW of the 3 bit 970 EVO that you mentioned. They are constantly writing data 24 hours a day, although not huge amounts. We shall see how long they last. The spinning drives are starting to fail after 2 years, but they were 2.5" Toshiba laptop drives and I never had much faith in them in the first place.

great explanation! just what I was looking for after stumbling on some very worrying Twitter threads but your video and explanation gave me peace of mind

The biggest problem I have with this is, why can't we replace the SSD? The enclosure of the M1 Mini has more space than ever. Despite the greenwashing, they are not environmentally friendly at all.

this would never have been a problem had Apple decided to use a swappable SSD. they already charge a thieving amount for their storage and storage upgrades which puts them right up with enterprise grade SLC drives if not more expensive. And it is more of a problem for an average consumer since they generally want to buy a product and keep it for as long as possible while a professional user knows about this stuff (most likely) and their work would warrant and allow for a repeated expense.

Five years is a very short lifespan for an entire computer. Many people replace their computers when the machines are around 4-7 years old, but they don't just throw them in the trash. If a non-replaceable vital part of a computer can die near the end of a normal users needs, then that really hurts the second hand market, since you have no real way of knowing if the computer you buy can last for years or months. Furthermore I don't really feel the video delves enough into the consequences of the Swap-usage. 80 GB / day seems like quite a lot if we are talking about normal usage, but part of the worry is that there has been reported more than 80 GB per _hour_ for some users.

This video has indeed given me a peace of mind... Thankyou..

Excellent breakdown with figures and logical approach. Thank you sir! I've been on the fence about buying an M1, but this video has helped a lot.

I’m subbing because he didn’t push it on to me like every other sweaty KZfaqr

That is good content. Well produced, good quality, balanced information. Very informative and easy to digest. Keep up the good work.

It would be nice though to have some warning when they start to fail! Great video!

Always solid advice!

Congrats for the 10k, I do use my machine everyday and edit videos at.least 3 times a week, I do think I should be fine. But at the same time I am Hoarder of my old mac's and it would suck when the ssd dies

Love your Jony Ive cadence. It actually makes one LISTEN attentively to you without much distraction! Very informative, too, without getting too geeky on us.

There should be operating level load leveling so that one sector of the SSD doesn’t get pounded all the time. There is also a practice among a limited number of SSD manufacturers (OWC is one) that, in addition to load leveling reserves a portion of the SSD as spares to take over when or if some give out. I have no idea if Apple have included this in the M1. They should.

Thanks for the content. This was a main concern for me as I intend to do some software development work. Wish I could have found this earlier but I went with the base model with ram upgrade in the end

Thanks for asking (and answering) important questions - you're the first one who touched this one. Great job!

Your usual straight forward, useful geekery. Thanks

Simple and concise explanation of a complex topic. Also , no need to worry about the life span of my M1 Mini.

Thank you, Dave. Another great video and very clear and interesting. I really like the captions, which are neat, attractive and easy to read, while giving weight to your spoken words. 😊

Good question. subscribed. Keep up the analysis and relevant content！

I have had my 1tb 16gb MacBook Air for nearly 2 years now and smartctl is still saying that my Percentage Used is 0%, according to this I have only written 3.65 TB of data in that time. One of the main reasons I got the 16 GB model is reduce wear and tear on the SSD, given this, this laptops ssd should last 100 years or more! :) Im a happy Chappy…

Thank you for this video. Perfectly explained!

Very useful info as always.

Hi, I am Doing machine learning and I Write like 80Gb every 10min... wow I really have a concern about this... already added my Report in the Survey. thanks for sharing this info.

I'm glad to hear someone else owned a Psion. I sometimes feel like I was the only one, even though I had a Series 5, and there obviously had to be previous models that did well enough to justify a Series 5...

Great video Sir, thank you!

Love this channel. And the podcasts too!

Super informative. Thank you!

simple, straight forward, easy to understand explainations. Thanks sir! the world needs a lot of brilliant people like you. keep it up! 😎🤘👏👍👌💯

Great explanation! I learn a lot by watching this vídeo!

My 2012 15' retina MBP sais hello everybody. the battery knackered, keyboard worn out, scratched and dented. Oh it's been a hot ride, playing a lot of world of warcraft, developing in java and c++ with JetBrains IDEs hitting the SSD for years. Still works? Like a charm! Don't worry!

SSD failure is something I read about all the time but I never had SSD fail on me last 10 years I have used them. Regular spinning hard drives failed me many times but not SSDs.

I set my windows paging to 16mb. Used to set it to none but I can't any more on my system drive. I also put all my profile data in an external hard disk. And link all the log files to it.

That was informative, I do not regret to have buy the MacBook air 512G model. Well done

You are assuming equal level wear, the problem is worse because unless you reserve capacity which samsung recommends. Let's say you have a 1tb drive the lifespan is based on the free capacity/reserve space not total capacity of the drive

We learn something new everyday, thanks! 😊🙏

A GEM OF A CHANNEL.

Exactly the info I needed ty!

Soldering on an ssd is like welding in spark plugs for your car