Okay, hold on for a second. I am the OP. This title is misleading. We didn't say "most". I wasn't able to clearly reproduce this, the people on Twitter are reporting wildly different numbers, some of which are reasonable, and certain usage patterns with heavy swapping <i>have</i> to wear down the SSD. And this also affects Intel macs to some extent.<p>What we know so far is that <i>some</i> people are reporting completely unreasonable, dangerous levels of SSD write volume, which on some configurations would be expected to prematurely wear down SSDs (which are not replaceable) well before the expected lifetime of the device. We don't know yet what triggers this; it looks like some kind of bug or software combination, but it's too early to have good leads.<p>The worst example so far is David's, which, if scaled proportionally (by Flash cell wear) from his 2TB SSD to a base 256GB model, would be reaching 100% lifetime usage within less than a year. This calculation is based on an assumption of equal (proportional) overprovisioning for those two models, and an assumption that whatever triggers this behavior doesn't care about total SSD size; these are sensible assumptions to make at this stage but not verified.<p><a href="https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1361160838854316032" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/marcan42/status/1361160838854316032</a><p>This is clearly a software problem, and fixable with an update. It's not a hardware defect, it's the kernel (we think it's a VM* issue) hammering the SSD way too much.<p>There is reason to be concerned, and to make sure Apple fixes this if it is a real bug. There is no reason to be alarmed and panic about these machines. If this is a real issue they <i>have</i> to fix it; they aren't stupid, Apple knows full well that the SSDs in some M1 macs dropping like flies within a year would be a PR disaster for them. What we need to do know is gather data and try to find a way to reproduce this.<p>* VM means Virtual Memory, not Virtual Machine, in this context, for all you non-kernel folks.
Considering the data available, 1% used in 2 months, that is 6% in a year, or roughly 16 years to 100%. SSDs have wearout indicators for a reason, but how long do you honestly expect it to last ? Had it been spinning rust you'd be lucky to get 5 years out of it.<p>Most users will be able to get a decade worth of usage out of it.<p>Nothing to see here, move along.
Seeing terabytes of writes may seem scary, but the device is reporting only 1% of its lifetime used ("percentage used"). It seems author doesn't know how to read (or for some reason doesnt trust) the report he run.<p>This is the figure that storage manufacturers use in their warranties to decide if a device has been excessively used - NOT the amount of writes.
No, this is about that they, probably for software reasons, write a lot to the SSD which might cause defects in the future. This is not a hardware issue (apart perhaps from the 8Gb memory limitation)