If you’ve read any of my previous articles on this machine, you’ll doubtless be bored of me rambling on about how wonderful it is. My M1 Mac mini currently runs my entire business. I decided to run the test on the four Macs I have in my studio. In fact, they’re far too detailed for a mere mortal like me, but there are lots of bar graphs and conversational language used to illustrate the shape of your SSD, so I can work with that. The reports it produces are incredibly detailed. DriveDx offers a limited free trial, which is ideal if you just want to quickly dip in and check the health of your drive. The tool I used to test the SSDs in my Macs comes from a company called Binary Fruit. There are suggestions that the issues could be software related (in so far as macOS needlessly writing to the drive when it should be doing something else), but the findings are worrying, regardless. If there’s anything sinister behind the iMore report, maybe I’m wrong. But my response has always been the same: would Apple really sell a laptop that could potentially fall into disrepair before its standard warranty expires? Surely these kinds of concerns have been abstracted away from us thanks to advancements in software and the reliability of SSDs? They point out that the measly 8GB of RAM in my M1 MacBook Air will simply wear the drive down over time, because so much additional pressure is put on the SSD to do the work of missing RAM. I’ve received a few comments about this on my videos and blogs whenever I wax lyrical about how great the M1 chip is with such limited RAM. Some refer to it as the built-in “time of death”, which is rather tragic, but also an unavoidable fact of modern computing. This has long been a challenge for manufacturers for all the speed, efficiency and silence of SSDs, they do have a limited life span. This is concerning, because that TBW figure is essentially an indication of how long a drive will last.Įvery SSD has a maximum TBW value which gradually erodes the drive’s efficiency the closer you approach it. In layman’s terms, this means that under particularly heavy load, M1 Macs are spending far too much time writing to their SSDs. “The most severe cases have “consumed” about 10-13% of the maximum warrantable TBW value of the SSDs (given their capacity & using values for equivalent market-available NVMe drives).” “Some more professional users of the new M1 Macbooks are experiencing extremely high drive writes over relatively short time. The iMore article quotes a posting on the LTT forums. Should we be worried? To find out, I decided to run some tests (yeah, I know – this is Mr ‘I Don’t Do Benchmarks’ talking here). Relating to the TBW (total bytes written) figure, the findings suggest that, under heavy use, some M1 machines won’t even last half a year. In short, there are definitely things Apple can do to improve the next Mac mini – in whatever form that takes.īut it appears there might be a far bigger problem lurking beneath the skin of that aluminium casing.Īccording to iMore, some M1 Mac owners have received rather worrying health readings from their SSDs. As wonderful as my M1 Mac mini is, it isn’t without its problems.įor instance, there’s the much publicised Bluetooth issues (which are largely fixed following macOS 11.2), and the distinct lack of ports.
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