The other thing as to why you get a larger SSD than you think you need is an issue with wear levelling. The TBW metric is oversimplified. The SSD has a number of blocks (say 1000 for a simple example), each of which can be rewritten 1000 times. What happens if the SSD keeps rewriting the same block rather than sharing the load? If your SSD is 80% full, then all that writing and rewriting is spread over the 20% of blocks remaining, which means that those blocks get worn out way quicker than the TBW lifespan metric would indicate. I'm writing this on a refurb Thinkpad I got off eBay for £150, which has an nvme slot. It's current SSD is small (250GB) and is about 60% full with all my music and other software installed. But as and when that becomes an issue, it is an M.2 SSD, so I can replace it. The RAM is 4GB fixed plus one slot (currenty 4GB but I can stick a 16GB stick in at some point). I can understand fixing the memory to the CPU (better speed/latency). Having two tiers of memory (fast RAM on the CPU and secondary RAM in slots on the motherboard) would complicate things. But soldered storage is a cardinal sin. I have a friend who is mac only. Her current Mac has served her well for 10 years. A new mac will cost a lot, and this video points out what I'm very concerned about, namely that she won't get 10 years out of a new mac. 5 if she's lucky. So the cost is amortised over half the time, so is effectively twice the price per-year compared to her current mac. More and more Macs are becoming a means for Apple to rinse the rich, and to hell with everybody else.

Louis Rossman also covered this issue with the failed texas intruments component failure. Its absolutely shameful how apple designed the logic board with no abily to protect the ssd from being destroyed

Tip: buy the lowest possible storage option; use it till warranty expires; find a third-party that does ssd chip upgrade. Tons of money saved.

Even my first MacBook from 2011 is still running like a charm 😅 But I admit it was a better time when you could simply replace the ssd and ram ❤

As an Apple Certified Technician you nailed this topic very well and very informative, but… 1) You made the swapping issue more dramatic and dynamic than it usually is. Yes, swapping is bad, but it's not as constant and dynamic, meaning that the "200MB" swap file is not constantly being written back and forth, it's the amount of swap being used. And Swap memory is not and does not act like Random Access Memory, that is wrong, it's a temporary inactive "cache" part of the used memory stored for later use and to give space back for immediate needs. 2) You left out an important issue about SSD space and longevity, filling up the drive and keeping it that way as your main and only storage is bad, very bad, as there is little room for the OS (and you) to perform common tasks and for the SSD controller to execute wear leveling. Leading to a premature wear of cells. 3) The type of NAND flash (MLC, TLC, QLC) chips have a huge impact and it's not simple or short to explain here, a good excuse to investigate and make another educational video. In short, avoid QLC based SSDs. Apple uses TLC from all the manufacturers that supply the chips, fortunately. 4) TBW is not an "end of life" point, but an average MTBF (meantime between failure) measurement and the majority of drives can exceed this "lifespan" metric many times. Your example proves it as the drive had 80% life left after doubling its TBW. In theory and statically in practice (not counting manufacturing defects) the life of the SSD in soldered MacBooks will out pass the lifespan of the machine by the average user ownership period of 4-5 years for an 8GB SSD. But if the TBW is higher, better (a larger drive will always be recommended as you mentioned in the video, double that if you add more RAM, but of course this is expensive when it comes to Apple's pricing scheme). Good video!

This is an amazing breakdown. To all my mac mini family, i'm using a dock with an external SSD. I am not saving anything on my internal SSD. All downloads go directly to my SSD within the dock. Glad I found this video early.

Nice video! At 13:09 RAM means Random Access Memory. Random means that you can read or write any (random) location in the memory with the same access time. Compare this to Sequential Memory like a tape drive where you have to wind the tape to the correct position to access the data.

The best explanation of how an SDD works, why they fail, and what you can do to prolong their life that I have found. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I will now be making changes to both my iMac and PC setups to prolong the life of the SSDs that I have in both systems.

the best things to do is to stop buying their products and see what they do to get you back!

You're absolutely right. As a person with fairly good computer knowledge I knew about this problem even before I watched your video and commented this sad fact on nearly every LTT video about Macs I watched. I did however underestimate how many died that early because of the SSD reaching its maximum write cycles. It's damn infuriating and shocking. Thanks for helping to quantify the extent of the problem !

This video was awesome, I am aware of all this stuff already but I’ve never seen a video this good explaining it to the average person. I will definitely refer people to this video when they ask me what they should get. Bravo!

Thanks for the reminder. I just checked my swap file and it was 11GB, despite having 32GB of RAM. Gotta shut things down when I finish, or finish projects more quickly

I have 2 older MacBooks, a 2012 and 2009. Both are running Linux Mint 21.1 , both have maxed RAM and both have 1TB SATA SSDs. They run and look great. I also have a fully repairable/upgradable i7 Framework laptop 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD also running Mint. Finally, I have a 2020 M1 MacBook Air 256gb which will be my last. It will be Framework & Linux from now on. My iPhone 12 will be my last iPhone too.

There's also a need to make a distinction between the types of SSDs used. Older MacBooks used MLC or TLC SSDs which are slower but generally will last longer than the new cheap consumer QLC SSDs

Superb video! Your clear and concise explanation of TBW cycles is invaluable in helping to make an informed purchase of a new (or recent) device, and how to mitigate the inevitable entropy of SSDs leveraging M2 or other external storage for large files. Also, major bonus points for the humor!

This is the best way that I've seen the SSD problem explained. Everyone must buy an external SSD and use the internal one as little as possible. Thank you.

Thank you very much. This information is priceless. My wallet, my Mac, and myself, will benefit greatly from this information in my daily Mac usage going forward.

Hello, first of all it is a unique content. You explained very useful things. But a TBW lifespan doesn’t mean that SSD is going to die. It means that the manufacturer will no longer give guarantee to SSD. There is a lot of working SSDs which has already completed their TBW lifespan years ago. It is more about the breakdown of the storage cells in SSD. In normal conditions, most probably a user can use the SSD for couple more years after completing the TBW lifespan. It was a great content thanks to you.

I sincerely appreciate your flexibility and willingness to give excellent information. I wanted to express my personal gratitude for the effort and extra time you have contributed. Thank you for your confidence and support. Thank You.

Thank you, I never knew this about my M1 MacBook Pro. The animated explosions we’re also hilarious, along with your very humorous delivery style!

You’re providing better quality content as time goes by. Keep up the good work!

I'm still using my 2015 2.8 ghz 16gb i7 because I can easily upgrade it myself. I never bothered with the T1's with SSD on the motherboard and nothing but USB-C ports because the extra speed meant nothing to me if I have to totally reconfigure all of my hardware and software and pay premium price for a tiny hard drive. Here's hoping that you can slap an NVME Port on to the motherboard of a 2021 or later 14" and 16" MBP in the near future. Those are the only MBP's that I've gotten excited about since 2015 because they have flexible ,sensible connectivity and MagSafe too!

Yes when I was looking for my new laptop the removable SSD was one of the main points to have. Only issue I had with my Asus Zephyrus G14 was garbage wi-fi card, which I was also able to swap with good intel card.

I use my MacBook Pro professionally for work from home job + iOS app development, I buy a new MacBook then run it for about 3 years under AppleCare and then sell it right before AppleCare runs out. This way I still get a lot of resell value from my device as well and the upgrade is about half the cost of a new MacBook and it never truly 'ages' to point of breaking completely.

this is what holding me from purchasing macs these days...it really happened

Great video. Definitely informative and easy to comprehend. My previous MacBook Pro, 2011, still kicking, anything new should give u that life span or more, I think!

Thx for the info. What program can i use to check the TBW on my SSD?

Swap does not work as you explained it. It usually moves to swap longer time not used memory pages (parts). Thus this pages are just written once in many cases and never used again. So the effect on ssd lifespan is small. But bigger RAM is always good to have.

What a fantastic video! Great content and many many thanks for explaining it like the way it should be! Cant wait for the remaining parts. Not to mention the humour! Haha! Subscribed!

After 2 times internal SSD got fried/die, I finally conclude to go for external nvme casing and booting from TB3 cable. All it was my random trial and error method. To me SMART was a jock. Surprised to see your video. Thanks for beautifully explained video. In other words I must say the video is the summary of my 2 years of struggle with my imac. Thanks for the video, Keep doing more. I have already subscribed to your channel. Thanks.

The way you make these videos I'M HOOKED ❤ You can literally make this style of videos on any topic I CAN WATCH THEM FOR HOURS ❤

That was a great video. You touched on all the pertinent points and explained the problem and solution well. Loved the spare kidney joke near the end.

Wow my 2012 Mac mini with SSD cached fusion drive still working well today.

I think upcoming EU rules will oblige manufacturers like Apple to make easy repairable products in order to combat e-waste and restore consumer rights. So that would mean replaceable SSDs and batteries for laptops. These manufacturers (like Apple) will do this only when they have to in order to comply to the law (like using USB-C ports).

Awesome presentation Dude. I've been sitting on the fence with a load of info on Macbooks M2 models . This has put me on the ground . My 2011 has battled on this far and now deciding on windows world where that shit loads up temp files on your SSD

Wow!! Thank you for the info. Very helpful!! Please keep up the good work!!

Seen it mentioned in another video that the chip that's supposed to deliver iirc 2.5V to the SSD sometime goes screwy and ends up sending iirc 13V to the SSD which nukes it, burning out the NAND chips on the SSD

Thank you for your assessment. I bought a used 2015 MacBook Pro since all later models had faulty keyboards AND board mounted SSDs. I prefer to be able to upgrade SSDs and RAM myself and I am disgusted at the built in redundancy that Apple now implements in all their products.

I just saw there are external NVMW M.2 2280 SSD you can hook up your to you macbook pro and have a 1553MB/s speed. You can set it up to use the usb-c for booting from that drive instead of the internal soldered SSD.

Hello, I am interested in the adapter, thanks to which it is possible to connect an M.2 NVMe SSD disk to the MacBook pro 15 A1707. I want to ask if you are planning versions for other models in the future and if it is even technically possible - I am specifically interested in the macbook pro 16 A2141. Thank you

What nonsense... "150TBW" does NOT mean it will die once you reached those "limits". Just like a car is not magically stop running just because you reached the 50.000 miles your car seller gives you guarantee for. It's the MINIMUM the manufacturer guarantees until it MAY stop working. But in reality, the limit is much much higher than that. There are even a lot of tools to get to know how much life span your SSD as left and how hard you're able to hit it. On my 512GB MacBook Air for example, I would have to write over 140GB to the SSD Every. Single. Day. To reach the probably maximum life span after over 9 years(!!!). 9 years of constant 140GB/day.

Other manufacturers like Dell are doing the same thing nowadays. I think with the industry moving to more "optimized" and sleeker designs, this trend will continue to grow.

Great video and explanation. I finally understood this concept. Then it makes sense to buy a big memory and with base storage and get a large externally ssd or cloud storage.

Best video I have ever seen, just looking at buying an iMac mini/studio. After this I am looking at the base studio because of the extra ram and performance. Thank you

Excellent video! I think it's the best informative video I've ever watched. You deserve an award. The narration and graphics are the seller. You made it easy to understand a sophisticated (or at least the least explained) topic. You're a good teacher. You are an excellent content producer. Thank you for making this video and helping people understand this important topic.

I don't know if it's intentional or not, but you make the SSD usage ware case sound quite more scary than it actually is. My first ever SSD (a 256GB Samsung 840 PRO) is being used in a PC that almost never shuts down for almost 10 years now. It has 74000 hours of operation, and 58 TBW used, with typical user usage. I don't know if such an old model has 300TBW limit or not, but even if it has 150 TBW (as if it was a modern 128GB SSD) this would mean that it has more or less another 15 years of life in it. It will be 25 years old if it ever reaches to that point! I have had mechanical disks that failed quite sooner than the 10 years mark! The only real issue with Apple is that SSD's are soldered on the board, and it's not easy to replace/upgrade them. That's more of a concern if the SSD goes faulty, rather than if it wears out due to usage and reach it's expected TBW after (most likely) 15 or 20 years.. Especially since Apple declares most of it's products obsolete after 7-8 years of their release (and unfortunately Microsoft copied with it's Windows 11 upgrade policy). IMHO a typical user should just enjoy the ease and convenience SSD's offer, and not live in a constant fear that he may have written a few GB more today on his SSD, or that the movie he downloaded damaged his disc. And finally IMHO unless you need HUGE storage space, external discs belong in the past and should stay there. Granted, USB C protocol is very fast, but external discs are bulky and messy. If my internal disc can fit all the data I need and leave at least 25%-30% of the drive empty, why should I bother to carry around spare discs, remember to connect them, then remember to not move my MAC while the discs are connected (or to not use it on my lap) then remember to eject them, and finally disconnect them? Supposedly MACs are famous for the ease of their usage and the total user experience they offer, no ? PS: I have both a 2021 MBP and a 2021 Asus ROG laptop. The Asus came with 1TB SSD on board. Not only this SSD can be replaced/upgraded, but it also offers a second M.2 slot. So now the Asus has it's original SSD and a second 2TB Samsung 980 M.2 PRO. And the coolest thing is that I didn't had to send it away for the upgrade, nor become an expert to desoldering/soldering components. I just unscrewed 6 screws, put the disc in, screwed the screws back and I was done in less than 5 minutes! Aaaah... Apple! :P

Great job of explaining all these things...also love your sense of humor. Thank you.

this video is great! What is that application you used to check SSD health 14:05? Drivedx?

Straight after having finished installing and configuring my Mac Studio Max (standard model with 32GB ram and 512GB storage) I moved my user profile to a TB3 NVMe enclosure with a 2TB Seagate Firecuda 530 in it. That leaves the precious internal storage for te OS and Applications. True that the internal storage is faster, but you won’t notice a difference in real life. So when I copy a file to my desktop it is actually on the external storage, this goes for all user profile related data like Pictures, Documents and Download folders.

Nice video. My office issued M1 MacBook Pro has 64 GB RAM and 1TB SSD, so it's most likely going to outlast its useful life. My M2 MacBook Pro has 16GB RAM and 512 GB SSD. I don't run too much heavy stuff on it, so I haven't noticed it swapping. But it's shocking how much memory apps use these days. The KZfaq browser tab displaying this video is currently taking 0.6GB! So, it's easy for the usage to quickly add up if you have lots of stuff open. I also have a 2014 Mac mini with a (replaceable) SSD that's going strong - used primarily as a media server, so it hardly does much writes. BTW, Random Access Memory doesn't mean what you say - "data is randomly moving in and out". Here, random simply means you can access data (read or write) in approximately the same time, regardless of which location it is stored at. Contrast this with a Hard Disk or even tape where certain locations take longer to access than others.

Nice work on animation and cateogires covered in the video. Great content

All those KZfaq Apple Gurus promoting buying the base level MacBooks because they are a much better deal than maxed out models. Turns out they were dishing wrong advice. Unless you’re the type to buy a MacBook every 2 years…

Thank you very much for the detailed information. Even for 150 TBW, someone writing 50 GB every day, would need 3000 days to reach this. But just in case, I will be storing my large videos directly to an external disk.

On top of all this great advice you can also use your MacBook every other day and you will double the lifespan of the SSD.

Excellent brother, Appreciate your effort for sharing knowledge, One request, keep sharing 😇

BEST explanation ever. Well done. Subbed and will recommend.

Planned obsolescence , no way to repair and reuse, typical Apple tactics.

You guys are awesome! Everytime you upload I learn something new. This time, THANK GOD I did not buy a new MBP. Lol. Still have a 2012 (pre retina) going strong. You know, from the era apple products were not suck..

One of the best explanations I've seen on KZfaq.....subscribed !

Superb video. The information will help preserve the life of my SSD. Thank you very much.

I contemplated whether I needed the 64GB RAM version and now I’m glad I chose that option. I have seen spikes exceeding 32GB of RAM (by a tiny bit). Thanks for this valuable info!

Amazing job! you have a new sub. Just to say in relation to 12:24 : I've a 16GB of ram Macbook Air M1 and it uses swap memory even with a lot of ram available. I think this is just the way macOS works

I run my m1 mini off external thunderbolt ssd because at time of purchase i chose to upgrade ram and go 250 onboard. Im curious if running mac os off external like this will help extend onboard drives life.

Excellent!! I did do well getting the M1 Max with 64 RAM and 2TB storage, still performing great and 99% SSD lifespan available. The question is, once SSD dies can be replaced by another??

I'm not entirely afraid that my SSD will fail due to too much data being written to it. I've got a 1TB Samsung 970 Evo as my PC's system drive, had it for about two years and even with HEAVY use I have only written 15TB to it. Considering I use my MacBook in instances when I work remotely and offload pretty much all tasks to an external NVMe SSD, I think it's more likely some IC is gonna fry long before I write 150TB to my laptop's SSD.

It is easy to see TBW your SSD already used with software. For Windows I use Open Hardware monitor. I put the SSD in the computer 2 years ago. It has 12TBW. So it's using 6TBW a year. It's a 500gb Samsung 860 evo drive. It claims at least 180TBW, so it could last up to thirty years :) So no worries about TBW :)

Is it possible to add a zener diode to voltage line that will short to ground when voltage goes above acceptable level for SSD?

thanks. after one year of using my mac mini and spending my time killing the apps in the monitor as it uses too much ram; I have more in-depth infos than most people want to tell on utube !

I manage a fleet of 100 PCs in my company and saw many broken HDDs but not even once had a damaged SSD. Some are up to 7 years old and Soldered NVM ssd's are not too uncommon here and we don't even buy very large drives. I never buy PCs with less than 16gb Ram to prevent excessive swapping. I dont' believe any regular user will ever reach the TBW of it's disk.... At least not before the battery has died and the external aspect of the case will make me buy another computer for this user. The over-voltage problem you mention is just the result of a terrible motherboard design by Apple and I smell a class action coming at them. Computers are not supposed to fry their SSD. It reminds me of the Nvidia chips problem on Mac Book Pros a few years ago, which to be honest was better handled by Apple in terms of after-sales support than by most PC manufacturers similarly affected by that same plague (those Nvidia chips were the culprits).

If someone make a replacement mainboard with removable nvme drive and ram using the MBP mainboard form factor to serve as a drop in replacement, they can be very rich.

Very nice explanation, easy to understand, thank you for the video 👍

Super valuable information. Thanks for the video

SSDs are a gold mine for apple strategically. It makes me shudder when I'm reminded that they're soldered on. For anyone that's ever attempted data recovery, it's always harder to recover a corrupted SSD. HDDs give you indicators that something is going wrong and you have multiple avenues to attempt recovery but an SSD is ridiculously more difficult to recover data from successfully. I was replacing the HDD on an old laptop that was pretty slow with HDD issues popping up and after cloning the drive it ran almost like new. My friend around the same time sent me their SSD to see if I could fix it because it was glitching and intermittently experiencing slowdowns. While I could access the drive, certain files would trigger intense slowdowns if I interacted with them. I had an SD card behave the same way before and knew it was corrupted. While a partially corrupted HDD can be cloned, SSDs refuse to even engage wih any cloning software or hardware. I only use an SSD in my laptop because Windows 10 doesn't run well on HDDs because they skipped optimizing their file system because they didn't think they needed to anymore with faster SSD speeds. I only bought that laptop because it had a secondary HDD that I could offload the heavy file manipulation to. While SSDs have a finite number of writes before burning out, HDDs are only limited by their moving parts wearing down. They actually run longer, the less you cycle them on and off. We're making it so much more expensive for the average person to recover from a solar flare...

I always back-up my data on a old school harddrive. I never experienced problems doing that, it's slow…, but I only put data on that HD drive that I barely use. I hate Apple for soldering SSD's. And Apple cares about the environment. 😂😂😂 I call that greenwashing!

Regarding higher RAM and SSD lifetime - What you save on swap file you lose on hibernation.

Thanks for waking me up: useful info! 👏

I hate soldered SSDs, the thought of it just dying 😡 and if that wasn’t bad enough they have a data retention issue too 😩 some say the data will just fade away after about 10 years if not rewritten so I guess a lot of Nintendo Wiis will start dying soon ohh and Apple Silicon Macs keep their firmware on their SSD so if it breaks the Mac can no longer do anything like booting from an external system drive!

$800 for a 2tb ssd is the most jewish thing I have ever seen.

This channel is a Gem 💎. Content will age well. Please continue!

Very informative. Never knew all these about ssd health and death. Keep up the good work.

I think you missed one important point for the SSDs (not only for the soldered ones in the Macbooks), if you erase a file on the SSD, you will also loose parts of your TBW, as the the cells are cleared what is also a writing process, that makes all even worse, you can try to use more provision to have more spare-cells, what can expand the lifespan of the SSD, but i don't know if this works at the fruit computers. Also very important the more states a cell has the worse the endurance SLC, TLC, QLC. My conclusion: avoid like a plague soldered SSDs, avoid like another plague proprietary formats of SSDs. ONLY standard connectors (Sata, msata, m2)

TBW is actually to do with physics. Basically the NAND circuit in the SSD chip can only be cycled a limited number of times. The TBW grows with disk size as bigger disks reserve more 'spare' nand cells to use when some go bad. Simple free way to check your TBW is open a terminal window and type the command iostat -Id disk0 (that is a capital I and lowercase d) The last number is the number of bytes written since new. Divide by 1000000 to get TBW (actually 1048576 but a million is close enough)

Great video. I learned a lot. Does this principle apply to regular solid state drives as well?

Thanks for the great video. What brand of external hard drive should I use. And what type. And capacity. I’m looking at the 14 inch MacBook Pro. 1 tb ssd, 32 Gig. Thanks again.

Most People will not be able even reach any were near 150TBW on 128GB drive or 300TBW on 256GB drive even. For a 128GB drive with 150TBW you need to write 82GB data daily to reach 150TBW limit in 5 years. So 99.9% consumers will never reach the rated lifespan even majority of PRO will not be able to reach it unless it is a server doing data warehousing or chia mining 24X7.

I used an external ssd when the internal died. Good thing about Mac is you can boot a proper system even from external USB!

Thank you for this information bro!❤

I have learn a lot about Mac ssd. Thanks a lot. I’m using a 2017 Mbp with a 256gb ssd. 27TB data units written. I will change the thermal paste and the battery and for sure stop copy a lot of data in this Mac. Thanks again dude ❤

Like apple did not forsee this😂

1st of all. NEVER BUY MAC. IT IS TRASH. 2nd, only buy pc with swappable ram and ssd.

Wow!! Amazing video, Top Notch info, with the right amount of sarcasm. What you are doing is great! Keep it up.

I think the video just implied it but it helps the drive life by keeping plenty of free space. This allows the internal housekeeping to not write so much data (garbage collection). Also over-provisioning, which is a little involved since you partition the drive to not use all the space at the end.

You gave me several reasons why I should not to buy a Mac

what a painful video. Could have been 6min if it wasn't all about repeating the same sensational words over and over and over.

Thank you for sharing this information.

Very informative..thank you 👍🏻🙏🏻

Wow thank you for the info, you are amazing. Keep it up.

I have old laptop, in which I have same ssd from 2016. And I know in one day It will die, but I don't keep important stuff permanently in one place. Once I had mechanical drive fail on me, I nearly lost years worth work on that. So backing up is a mandatory thing for me. There is so many reasons not to use Mac's, but people are still buying them.

Could you also explain how much software like da Vinci resolve etc would utilise the 16gb Ram Great video

Thanks for the detailed video…I learned something new 👍🏼