SIMPLY THE MOST FANTASTIC VIDEO ABOUT SWAP MEMORY EVER!!!! Congratulations on your video and all the effort you put into research to get to this INCREDIBLE result! SIMPLY THE BEST!
4.3TB total, 4 months in so around 37GB a day. I'm more than safe with my 512GB ssd :) The step-by-step tutorial really helped! Most other tech RUclipsrs leave out certain steps. Much appreciated!
Feels like back to class again! Amazingly clear... Thx ! I saw your other video about M1 8/16 Gb Ram using Logic Pro, and got it well. Thx again! I'm using Logic Pro 10.6 with my old macbook air, for playing what i would call "live sets", playing for around 3 hours, 25 tracks more or less in Logic pro project (16 to 20 elements, samples and loops, per tracks in this "live loops" way) so ... i can have around 500 pre-loaded elements in the Ram! My macbook Air running an intel i7/8Gb of RAM is totally ...SMOKING!!! I don't even speak of the buffer that i need... at least at 512 (if not 1024!) Not to have my CPU crashing... For sure i need to limit the VSTs & plugins use to the strict necessary: Apple EQ on each track (over the magic EQ3 from fabfilter...), few compressors on my groups, one IR1 Rev, one H-delay... Very very tight, to keep all this running. So? i go for the Update with those magic M1 chips. I'm about to order the New 14" Macbook pro thinking of 1Tb SSD and 16Gb Ram, (32Gb seams extremely massive and 400$ for it a bit excessive... Don't you think? Some say that 16Gb on those new ones are as powerful as 32Gb on the old Intel model...) But i'm mostly wondering of the "utility" of 10 cores CPU versus 8... A video about it, or any suggestion, would be amazing! It's seriously a pleasure to hear you talking so clearly and with so much ease, about those ..."Things" that we are bound to: to express, to create, to work and communicate! Shine!
I hear your questions regarding 16 vs 32 Gig ram. What I understand is regardless of what pc or Mac 16 G ram is still 16 G. You can't really expect the ' Shared memory' to make up the difference in memory pressure. I have had cash in hand for a new machine for months trying to determine what the most advantages configuration is for my modest studio. I have a sub powered older Dell quad core that has such high latency when using external idi controllers that makes it useless. As well I have heard that external ssd are not as responsive on recall of samples and I am tempted to pay the additional$400.00 for an extra terabyte of ssd in the mac( mini M1 or Mac studio Max) just to give me the piece of mind .
Possibly the most valuable channel I've found on youtube for a long time. These videos are next level.. The educating skills in these presentations are nothing short of phenomenal.
Wow.. thank you for showing me the way, not into such things so it's amazing that I was able to get my numbers. So, I use about 27 GB a day on my MBA 250 GB/8 GB RAM
Another masterclass! Thank you, Mark. My Mac Mini M1 16/512 : 2,92TB written since december 21 2020. I use it about 4 hours per day, mainly for Logic Pro X in Rosetta 2 mode and Ableton Live 11. Looks like the SSD will last longer than I do(62)....... :)
Thank you. A nice explanation! I have a 8/512 GB Mac Mini. I got mine at the 16th of January.Currently I have 2.43TB written, so I am at 40.5 GB/day. But I am using it much. It runs probably around 15 hours per day (Homeoffice, private usage).
Thanks for the video, Mark. Just sharing data from my system. I have a 2014 MacBook Pro 13 with a 256GB SSD (intel machine of course). I’ve used it everyday for the past 6.5 years. My usage metrics are as follows: TDW: 55TB Daily Written Data: ~23GB
I don't have an M1 Mac, but I am considering one very soon. When I saw the news about the large amount of SWAP on the 8GB models, I got concerned a bit. But Mark, You've put all of these concernes to rest, very informative and educational, thank You !
As a Bachelor in Computer Science student my daily write is approx 27gb. I do all the college assignments and coding and attending Gmeet and Zoom for online classes watching video lectures and surfing through the web etc etc. I'm currently using the 8gb/256gb version of M1 MacBook Air.
This was great. I'm not a techie, but you explained it all in a way that I could understand and actually use. I think that unless you were some sort of business crunching massive amounts of data seven days a week, you would be fine. And if you were a business like that, you'd probably replace your computers well before you wore out the SSD drives. Thanks for another great video!
One of the best videos on this topic that is getting lot of attention of late. A must watch for anyone who want to know more about the truth. I just applied your techniques I find that my DWPD is coming to around 23.5gb. My M1 system is a 512gb configuration! A big thank you for sharing such wonderful explanation!
Erudite and clear as usual mate Going to start showing my IT students a selection of your videos that I think will be appropriate for them Thanks again for the hours of effort you are clearly putting in to these videos
Well I am not surprised to hear that. Your ability to break the material down in to bite sized chunks and accompany it with relevant extra explanatory material is the mark of a good teacher.
Where have you been all my life? Watched a couple of your videos this morning, and I already know 10x more than I knew before. Well explained in easy terms (let’s face it most IT stuff is obscured behind unnecessarily scary jargon which I’m sure is aimed at making some people look smarter than others). I’ll be watching this space for more! Excellent presentation.
Hi Mark, thanks for the great video on ssd wearing. I'm more inclined to buy an M1 now, since the ssd wear was one of my biggest doubts. However, could you share where you found the 0.3 factor for DWPD? I'd like to learn more on that before I make a final decision. Thanks, Pedro
Thank you. Terrific video. I'm at 28 GB/day on a MBP with 1TB SSD. Had the machine since Jan 1. It's used heavily for Audio Work (Logic). I also teach daily with it - about 3 hours of live class time on Zoom Mon-Fri teaching comp sci, programming and front/back web dev. Still, that can't amount to many writes. My initial install of 500 GB of audio sample libraries in early Jan skews this heavily. Lately, it's averaging only 9GB/day (100 GB with an uptime of 11 days).
I know windows used to (and maybe still does) have a feature like this, but Mac does not. The reason it doesn’t is because an external SSD is many times slower than the internal one so it would slow the whole computer down as it was waiting for memory to write and be read from the external SSD.
Great video. The only thing you should have covered is how to use the percentage to figure the lifespan of the drive. Ie if you use 1% in 2 months then you will use 100% in 200 months or *16.6 years* . I don't think it is Apple haters but people who just look at the write number and not the percentage number.
Wow, thank you so much Mark! I've learned lots from you! I've had my 1 TB, 16 GB RAM, M1 Air for two days! 😀 Using your program, I've written 515 Gigabytes over those days, which divides out to be 257.5 GB/day. I'm not too worried since I've been downloading lots of programs into my SSD. Using the activity monitor, I have written 78.4 GB over the past 22:35 hours. I think I'm alright.
Well I have had my MBA 8gb for 3 days and this is the results I am getting, I am using FCPX and keeping my video files only on my external SSD, I am starting to think theres something wrong with my laptop. Data Units Read: 3,366,935 [1.72 TB] Data Units Written: 4,000,152 [2.04 TB]
@@TheMrboombostic yes it did, I think the main reason it settled is because I am creating proxies for my 4k footage (1080p) and turned off GPU acceleration in Lightroom, I am editing all day and I am getting around 30 gb/day of data writen, I am also using a external SSD (I am not sure how much that helps).
Yes!!! :-) Thank you very much, Professor Payne! :-))) Great answers for people like me, who are using computers, but have no idea of how they actually work! 🙏
Thank you so much for your time and expertise making this excellent video - this was so incredibly useful and answered so many questions at once…and also helped tremendously in the decision about the capacity of the SSD for my next MBP. Thanks again! 😊
Great explanation of SSD writes. I learned a lot. Don't have an M1 machine yet, but looking to upgrade a mid-2010 iMac, so this video has really helped to diminish any concern about SSD wearing out too soon. Thanks.
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.
Very good. Fore more specialist applications the latest updates the latest updates sometimes break things! I think at the moment with M1 it _is_ important to ride the updates as they happen. Later... when things are more established I may like to not be fixing it unless it is broken.
Excellent video! I have a 16GB RAM 256GB M1 Air. Running smartmons using your tutorial I found that I have written just over 4 TB is 7 months, which comes out to about 19 to 20 GB per day, well under the 75 GB per day. So theoretically this M1 machine should last for quite a while before the SSD wears out.
Ditto on the other comments made. Excellent explanation and real world testing. I love the speed of the internal SSD but this issue had me nervous. Fears calmed.
Fantastic explanation. Clear, precise and simple. Thank you. Will have to look at the disk writes after a long render to have a better idea of where I stand. I just bought my M1 Max, 32Gb RAM/GPU, 1Tb SSD a couple of weeks ago, so I hope at least Blender and Logic won't destroy it too soon! I do get a whopping amount of swap whilst rendering and watching RUclips on Safari at the same time, but I'll be sure to keep checking my daily usage to see where I'm at and if there is anything I can do more efficiently. Thanks again! Subbed. Slightly less anxious about it now.
Such a good video! I am no longer concerned. Purchased a 512GB M1 Pro one month ago and have done 24.77GB per day. I am interested to see how that number changes after having done all of my data migration and app install duties. On 3.75 (roughly) days of uptime my average is 3.94GB. That’ll do nicely.
Mark really interesting and explained in a way I could fathom. My Mac Pro Mid 2012 OS 11.2.3, uptime 3 days data read 27.7GB / written 26.35GB SSD 1TB Seagate FireCuda 120 SSD ZA1000GM10001. Thanks for a great channel.
Thanks for the detailed explanation of the memory swap on apple M1. I have noticed that using a memory cleaning application like Memory clean 2 or similar program will push more data to be written on your SSD . So I believe using these applications will increase the data written on your SSD just by pressing the clean button which does no magic to the RAM, it only moves data from RAM to SSD even when your RAM is not under pressure. We would be better off if we let macOS do its magic in managing memory then using some random third party application that does nothing special.
I'm using my Macbook air "256 GB _ 8 GB" for "20 days" TBW=630 (32GB/day). Not a huge deal but I will be more careful and will observe the following days , although mind that we tend to write a lot more data when we get a new device, so no worries .
Great video! Thanks for sharing this information. I'm a heavier user on my 1tb m1pro 16. I'm using 97.7gb a day on average. I will say that my computer has been using much less memory since a recent update so I'm sure that is helping me stay out of swap. SMART still shows 0% usage in 130 days of use. I'm happy to know that I will get a long life out of this computer and be able to pass it on for life after me.
thanks for your explanation Ik have a 256 GB en have it sinds 22 febr. I have written in total 1110GB, that's about 39 / 40 gb per day... I'm safe! Thanks!!
First time ever watching your channel, will be back. Excellent explanation. 10/10 with a little bit of background history too. By the way, you are the first person I’ve ever seen on RUclips to use an iPad Pro in a way that’s more than just a “teleprompter” let alone the Apple Pencil and certainly the first to screen capture from it rather than using an overhead camera shot.👍🏼👏🏼👏🏼 Out of curiosity what are you using to cast your iPad screen for capture? 🤷🏼♂️✌🏼
Yes, when I teach in a classroom I whiteboard a lot so this seemed to be a natural alternative for me. It took a while to find a WB that worked for me and this is MS Whiteboard, part of 365. I just screen record it on the iPad ... with audio so that I can sync it later in FCP.
@@MarkPayneAudio you do it seamlessly; so much so that I was fooled into asking the wrong question. Honestly thought you were capturing on the fly rather than merging in the final edit. Maybe you could look into doing such & cut a step out in your workflow - capture over USB-C from your iPad Pro.
Arh... well I do capture on the fly. What you see me type on camera is what you are seeing on the capture screen. I have to merge and sync 4 elements. 1. The recorded audio... from a studio mic above me off camera (mostly ! :-)) 2. The main camera, 3.The screen captures from any demo computers 4. The whiteboard.
All the calculations are done by Apple. Obviously, they are smarter than everyone on and visiting this channel including myself. But then a sudden death always happens... And when it happens, PC laptops can cope with just buying another SSD module. But not Macbooks. That's the primary difference.
Well, my iMac 27.0 TB written, which works out to about 180 GB/day, which sounds about right for my usage, which is going to be hell of a lot more than most people see. 0 used from the wear pool. I've got a 2 TB drive, half full. My only real worry is running out of disk space. Well, no, it's running out of USB ports to plug an external SSD into... Part of the reason I listened to the whole thing was to understand what people's concerns were-just the generic write cycle issue, or if there was something driving a high rate. In all my years of heavy usage even with smaller, older SSDs, I've never once seen an SSD wear out, or fail in any way. I'm not denying it's an issue to consider in certain circumstances, just that my experience is far beyond the typical usage and wholly favors SSDs. Magnetic drives' record has improved enormously since the days when we cleaned heads on 80 MB washing machines, but "hard drive failure" is something I just don't think about anymore. There are so many other risks to our data to motivate backups! I knew 99+% of the material, so the pacing was slow enough for me to pay attention to how you were explaining. Every time I'd think "but you need to explain..." you'd be explaining it before I'd finish the thought. For example, cylinders... You did a really nice job (I think; I'm not the right test subject!) The big thing I didn't know about was smartmontools. Thanks for that!
Thanks Bob, your comments mean a lot. I too remember head cleaning! You just reminded me. We should have mentioned sector skew from one surface to another which allowed the data placement to be shifted positionally in the cylinder to allow for head switch latency, that just came back to me.
@@MarkPayneAudio Yup. At an even lower level of detail was the low-level formatting with bit patterns to synchronize the bit clock, the sector address, so you could know you were reading/about to write the correct sector, a gap so you didn't overwrite the sector address, an ECC checksum at the end of the data capable of repairing something like 11 bits of consecutive error. A lot of details I don't remember anymore. Most of the time you could take all that as a given, but with a new model of drive, you would sometimes have to figure it all out. Disk controllers weren't as reliable then, either. I remember a few years later, when sealed "Winchester" drives were the norm, visiting a customer site with an unbootable system. Found in block 0 (which held a directory of bootable images), that a defective disk controller had written a 1 bit every N bits (the size of the write shift-register) whether it needed it or not. Replaced the controller, then set about figuring out which bits should have been zero instead, fixed them, and it booted. It was always kind of cool to identify a specific hardware failure from observed behavior at the software level. Found an ALU gate failure affecting a lesser-used operation once. The reliability levels required of modern hardware are astounding. This iMac can do in 1 second what would have taken hours on the system I started with (not counting the GPU!) and do it day after day without a single error.
My Mac Mini 2018 has less than 15GB DWPD. Bought it in Dec. 2018 and it has a 128GB SSD. So, even with the smallest SSD option I'm good. However it also shows me that my system writes less than half the data than yours on a M1 Mac. FYI, I only use the internal SSD for the OS and applications. All my files are on external devices.
We think a lot of this is about M1 systems. The worry is that they are VERY efficient with memory management allowing the systems to run performantly with very little RAM for big tasks. The internal SSD is used as backup swap space maybe more than would be expected and some users see BIG write rates as a result. That is the theory. You are probably not going to see this issue on older hardware anyway.
Great info…but has resulted in a bit of a worry for me. 4 month old m1 iMac Done 190TB of writes (1.5TB a day). I only do basic tasks- Mail, Safari, Firefox, office (Libre) etc. No video editing, photo editing etc. Health already shows 10% used. At this rate it’s only going to last around 3 years. Humm this could end up being an expensive mistake!
@@MarkPayneAudio yes 8GB system. I have monitored in the past 8 days (since my post above) and the writes seem minimal (10GB a day, so a factor of over 100 less than the 4 month average). So …. - maybe whatever was causing the issue has been fixed by an update? - maybe just some particular sequence of operations or app usage results in massive writes and I just haven’t done said sequence in past week? Either way the talk of this issue having been fixed by macOS 10.4 (as mentioned in a few places) is clearly not true as I’ve always had a more recent OS than that. I will continue monitoring. I’ve not tried to actually provoke writes by starting dozens of apps, opening huge photo edits etc etc.
There's also the fact that SSDs are fickle when the free space is less than 30% on a drive. My friend bought a MacBook Air based on my advice and she's getting insane 40GB+/day writes. All she uses it is for streaming content and almost nothing else.
Just tried it on my MacBook Air M2 which I got with 10-core GPU and 512GB but only 8GB RAM because it was the only model available besides the pure base one. And I surely was slightly concerned because of all the stupid articles about the whole topic but for no reason. I currently have a total written of 1.63TB in 38 days. That's less than 43GB per day which is far away from the about 156GB I could get each day based on the 512GB.
Hey Mark. This was such a nice video, congrats !. Nice edition btw. This might be offtrack but I was wondering… could you do a video talking a bit about how to take care of the M1’s battery ?. There are a couple of videos out there on youtube but I just love your way of explaining stuff !!! Thank you so much, and cheers from Chile >:D
@@MarkPayneAudio That info was cristal clear and we should all be able to know that before buy any laptop. Can't apreceate enough the fact that you took the time to help us out. Thank you very much. I have been wondering if there is any advantage from working with certain apps installed on a external drive so we can spare the internal ssd.
There is a report that someone in China is able to de-solder and upgrade the SSD. So, I guess, there is some hope that the whole machine won't be fried if the SSD fails prematurely. Not to mention that Apple will try to protect its reputation if a lot of SSD start failing by offering some sort of warranty replacement program.
Finally, It's a nice and technical expression instead of empty words. Thank you very much. In short, my MBP ( 16/256) won't die in five years If I limit myself to 75GB usage per day. Good to hear that. So, I have one more question. Will SSD slow down over time?
Please have a quick read and reply. Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 3% Data Units Read: 119,134,293 [60.9 TB] Data Units Written: 98,124,552 [50.2 TB] I have had the machine for year now. So according to this tool, 50TB is only 3% of the total health? Dividing 100\3%(health) = 33.3 Multiply 50.2TB*33.3 = 1673TB/1.63PB So is 1673TB/1.63PB the total expected TBW of my specific drive?
Awesome explanation as ever, thank you Mark! I have been watching your videos a lot now, and I must say, I am really enjoying these.This is for all as a question. I am on the verge of buying a Macbook, the only thing that I need suggestion with is; will Minitab software and Power Bi work on it? I have been researching a lot about this, but have not got a definite answer and that is stalling my first Macbook purchase. I would buy the 512 / 8. Would parallels do the trick for me, not sure
Interesting, Although I've just done the calculations, and based on my swap usage, I estimate I only have around 400 days lifetime on my SSD. (Brand new mac btw). I have AppleCare and plan to upgrade after it ends anyway in 3 years, so I am not that concerned. Edit: for anyone wondering, my mac is 500GB and has used 3TB Data written in kernal_task (swap) in the last 7 days alone. Not including the 90TB Data units written in total so far for my 80-day old mac.
This is the best explanation on this topic that I've ever seen!
Thank you, Mark!
Wow, thanks!
SIMPLY THE MOST FANTASTIC VIDEO ABOUT SWAP MEMORY EVER!!!! Congratulations on your video and all the effort you put into research to get to this INCREDIBLE result! SIMPLY THE BEST!
Wow, thank you!
I agree, what a great and simple explanation, thank you! Keep up with these amazing tech videos! Your competence really shows, have a great day
Love the old school relationships, easier to understand. Thank you kindly.
4.3TB total, 4 months in so around 37GB a day. I'm more than safe with my 512GB ssd :)
The step-by-step tutorial really helped! Most other tech RUclipsrs leave out certain steps. Much appreciated!
Excellent. On the money.
Feels like back to class again! Amazingly clear... Thx !
I saw your other video about M1 8/16 Gb Ram using Logic Pro, and got it well. Thx again!
I'm using Logic Pro 10.6 with my old macbook air, for playing what i would call "live sets", playing for around 3 hours,
25 tracks more or less in Logic pro project (16 to 20 elements, samples and loops, per tracks in this "live loops" way)
so ... i can have around 500 pre-loaded elements in the Ram! My macbook Air running an intel i7/8Gb of RAM is totally ...SMOKING!!!
I don't even speak of the buffer that i need... at least at 512 (if not 1024!) Not to have my CPU crashing...
For sure i need to limit the VSTs & plugins use to the strict necessary: Apple EQ on each track (over the magic EQ3 from fabfilter...), few compressors on my groups, one IR1 Rev, one H-delay... Very very tight, to keep all this running. So? i go for the Update with those magic M1 chips.
I'm about to order the New 14" Macbook pro thinking of 1Tb SSD and 16Gb Ram, (32Gb seams extremely massive and 400$ for it a bit excessive... Don't you think? Some say that 16Gb on those new ones are as powerful as 32Gb on the old Intel model...) But i'm mostly wondering of the "utility" of 10 cores CPU versus 8... A video about it, or any suggestion, would be amazing!
It's seriously a pleasure to hear you talking so clearly and with so much ease, about those ..."Things" that we are bound to: to express, to create, to work and communicate! Shine!
I hear your questions regarding 16 vs 32 Gig ram. What I understand is regardless of what pc or Mac 16 G ram is still 16 G. You can't really expect the ' Shared memory' to make up the difference in memory pressure. I have had cash in hand for a new machine for months trying to determine what the most advantages configuration is for my modest studio. I have a sub powered older Dell quad core that has such high latency when using external idi controllers that makes it useless. As well I have heard that external ssd are not as responsive on recall of samples and I am tempted to pay the additional$400.00 for an extra terabyte of ssd in the mac( mini M1 or Mac studio Max) just to give me the piece of mind .
The most complete explanation I've seen after weeks. Thank you for investing your time in this.
You're very welcome!
Possibly the most valuable channel I've found on youtube for a long time. These videos are next level.. The educating skills in these presentations are nothing short of phenomenal.
I'm using my base MacBook Air for university works and my "Data Write Per Day" is 6.5GB. I appreciate these kind of proper evaluation.
Nice!
Wow.. thank you for showing me the way, not into such things so it's amazing that I was able to get my numbers. So, I use about 27 GB a day on my MBA 250 GB/8 GB RAM
Glad it was helpful! Thats nice small numbers. No worries.
Another masterclass! Thank you, Mark. My Mac Mini M1 16/512 : 2,92TB written since december 21 2020. I use it about 4 hours per day, mainly for Logic Pro X in Rosetta 2 mode and Ableton Live 11. Looks like the SSD will last longer than I do(62)....... :)
Thats a worry when a computer can outlive you! I feel your pain!
Thank you. A nice explanation!
I have a 8/512 GB Mac Mini. I got mine at the 16th of January.Currently I have 2.43TB written, so I am at 40.5 GB/day. But I am using it much. It runs probably around 15 hours per day (Homeoffice, private usage).
Good numbers!
Brilliant. Took off fear before buying my first Mac.
This is a great video. Thank you! And wish you a happy and healthy long life so you can happily run the test on your SSD after 50 yrs.
Amen to that!
Thanks for the video, Mark.
Just sharing data from my system.
I have a 2014 MacBook Pro 13 with a 256GB SSD (intel machine of course). I’ve used it everyday for the past 6.5 years.
My usage metrics are as follows:
TDW: 55TB
Daily Written Data: ~23GB
Cool
I don't have an M1 Mac, but I am considering one very soon. When I saw the news about the large amount of SWAP on the 8GB models, I got concerned a bit. But Mark, You've put all of these concernes to rest, very informative and educational, thank You !
Glad to be able to help with the context.
As a Bachelor in Computer Science student my daily write is approx 27gb. I do all the college assignments and coding and attending Gmeet and Zoom for online classes watching video lectures and surfing through the web etc etc. I'm currently using the 8gb/256gb version of M1 MacBook Air.
This was great. I'm not a techie, but you explained it all in a way that I could understand and actually use. I think that unless you were some sort of business crunching massive amounts of data seven days a week, you would be fine. And if you were a business like that, you'd probably replace your computers well before you wore out the SSD drives. Thanks for another great video!
Thankyou!
One of the best videos on this topic that is getting lot of attention of late. A must watch for anyone who want to know more about the truth. I just applied your techniques I find that my DWPD is coming to around 23.5gb. My M1 system is a 512gb configuration! A big thank you for sharing such wonderful explanation!
Yes that's small beans usage. All good!
You are an amazing educator "the best", wow great info on this topic
Appreciate that!
Erudite and clear as usual mate Going to start showing my IT students a selection of your videos that I think will be appropriate for them Thanks again for the hours of effort you are clearly putting in to these videos
Please do! That is most rewarding. Back in the day I taught engineers and customers at Hewlett Packard but that was a good 20 years ago (and some) :-)
Well I am not surprised to hear that. Your ability to break the material down in to bite sized chunks and accompany it with relevant extra explanatory material is the mark of a good teacher.
Great, now I am more relaxed and can calculate myself. Thanks a lot, this was outstanding
Glad it helped!
Loved the theory and the explanation and the brief detour to contemplation of our mortal existence as a Mac user at the end
Thank you for taking the fear out of any fear-mongering going on.Great to know.
My pleasure!
I'm really impressed by the quality of this video. Brilliant stuff.
Thanks!
Amazing video. You should have way more views and subscribers!
Working on it!
Where have you been all my life? Watched a couple of your videos this morning, and I already know 10x more than I knew before. Well explained in easy terms (let’s face it most IT stuff is obscured behind unnecessarily scary jargon which I’m sure is aimed at making some people look smarter than others). I’ll be watching this space for more! Excellent presentation.
Many thanks!
You're the best Sir Mark Payne. Great tutorial, wonderful explanation.
Wow, thanks!
@@MarkPayneAudio You're welcome Sir.
Thank you for investing your time in this, love from Malaysia.
My pleasure!
This tech educational videos along with music production are your strength. Keep it going , love the content so far!
Thanks, will do!
Hi Mark,
thanks for the great video on ssd wearing. I'm more inclined to buy an M1 now, since the ssd wear was one of my biggest doubts.
However, could you share where you found the 0.3 factor for DWPD? I'd like to learn more on that before I make a final decision.
Thanks,
Pedro
Thank you. Terrific video. I'm at 28 GB/day on a MBP with 1TB SSD. Had the machine since Jan 1. It's used heavily for Audio Work (Logic). I also teach daily with it - about 3 hours of live class time on Zoom Mon-Fri teaching comp sci, programming and front/back web dev. Still, that can't amount to many writes. My initial install of 500 GB of audio sample libraries in early Jan skews this heavily. Lately, it's averaging only 9GB/day (100 GB with an uptime of 11 days).
That is very low write rate :-) Can I ask, is this a 16GB or 8GB system?
Excellent explanation Mark! Love your work!
Question, is it possible to allocate swap memory to an external SSD?
I know windows used to (and maybe still does) have a feature like this, but Mac does not. The reason it doesn’t is because an external SSD is many times slower than the internal one so it would slow the whole computer down as it was waiting for memory to write and be read from the external SSD.
The problem is Google Chrome caching and 3rd party browsers, just don’t use them.
Agreed.. I don’t get what is wrong with safari.
Great video. The only thing you should have covered is how to use the percentage to figure the lifespan of the drive. Ie if you use 1% in 2 months then you will use 100% in 200 months or *16.6 years* . I don't think it is Apple haters but people who just look at the write number and not the percentage number.
Wow, thank you so much Mark! I've learned lots from you! I've had my 1 TB, 16 GB RAM, M1 Air for two days! 😀
Using your program, I've written 515 Gigabytes over those days, which divides out to be 257.5 GB/day. I'm not too worried since I've been downloading lots of programs into my SSD. Using the activity monitor, I have written 78.4 GB over the past 22:35 hours. I think I'm alright.
Great to hear! That will propably settle down anyway and it sounds like you are in install phase as you say.
Well I have had my MBA 8gb for 3 days and this is the results I am getting, I am using FCPX and keeping my video files only on my external SSD, I am starting to think theres something wrong with my laptop.
Data Units Read: 3,366,935 [1.72 TB]
Data Units Written: 4,000,152 [2.04 TB]
Ale_Filmmaker did it ever settle down?
@@TheMrboombostic yes it did, I think the main reason it settled is because I am creating proxies for my 4k footage (1080p) and turned off GPU acceleration in Lightroom, I am editing all day and I am getting around 30 gb/day of data writen, I am also using a external SSD (I am not sure how much that helps).
If the SSD breaks down after 3 years, great, thanks for the free M4. Apple warranty/service is great.
Yes!!! :-) Thank you very much, Professor Payne! :-))) Great answers for people like me, who are using computers, but have no idea of how they actually work! 🙏
Prof Payne.... I like that but unfortunately.... I am just a Mr!
@@MarkPayneAudio hey, you‘re at least „Professor“ Payne, I think...;-)
Thank you so much for your time and expertise making this excellent video - this was so incredibly useful and answered so many questions at once…and also helped tremendously in the decision about the capacity of the SSD for my next MBP. Thanks again! 😊
Such a brilliant and underrated video, hats off Mr. Payne.
Thanks!
That, my friend, gets you another subscriber!
Perfect explanation for a layman like myself.
This is the most in depth video covering the issue. Thank you so much!!
Glad it was helpful!
Great explanation of SSD writes. I learned a lot. Don't have an M1 machine yet, but looking to upgrade a mid-2010 iMac, so this video has really helped to diminish any concern about SSD wearing out too soon. Thanks.
Glad it was helpful Tim! Are you going to wait for M2/M1X or take the plunge soon?
Really well Explained! Thank you.
Glad it was helpful!
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.
Very good. Fore more specialist applications the latest updates the latest updates sometimes break things! I think at the moment with M1 it _is_ important to ride the updates as they happen. Later... when things are more established I may like to not be fixing it unless it is broken.
Excellent video! I have a 16GB RAM 256GB M1 Air. Running smartmons using your tutorial I found that I have written just over 4 TB is 7 months, which comes out to about 19 to 20 GB per day, well under the 75 GB per day. So theoretically this M1 machine should last for quite a while before the SSD wears out.
You are amazing at explaining complex concepts!
Thanks!
Ditto on the other comments made. Excellent explanation and real world testing. I love the speed of the internal SSD but this issue had me nervous. Fears calmed.
Excellent Kurt!
Fantastic explanation. Clear, precise and simple. Thank you. Will have to look at the disk writes after a long render to have a better idea of where I stand. I just bought my M1 Max, 32Gb RAM/GPU, 1Tb SSD a couple of weeks ago, so I hope at least Blender and Logic won't destroy it too soon! I do get a whopping amount of swap whilst rendering and watching RUclips on Safari at the same time, but I'll be sure to keep checking my daily usage to see where I'm at and if there is anything I can do more efficiently. Thanks again! Subbed. Slightly less anxious about it now.
Cool!
Such a good video! I am no longer concerned. Purchased a 512GB M1 Pro one month ago and have done 24.77GB per day. I am interested to see how that number changes after having done all of my data migration and app install duties. On 3.75 (roughly) days of uptime my average is 3.94GB. That’ll do nicely.
No worries there then Adam, like we said, In my opinion this was a blown up issue and effects very few people. Let's see!
Great class! Thanks for the info
My pleasure!
84gb/day here and i use my mac all day long every day, i run illustrator, photoshop and some music production softwares. i got 1tb of ssd.
Mark really interesting and explained in a way I could fathom. My Mac Pro Mid 2012 OS 11.2.3, uptime 3 days data read 27.7GB / written 26.35GB SSD 1TB Seagate FireCuda 120 SSD ZA1000GM10001. Thanks for a great channel.
Thats write rate is nice small numbers :-)
I‘m glad you made it clear and saved my weekend. I‘m very happy with my M1 Macbook Air 8/512. You are the man - ok you are 1 year older than me :-)
Great to hear! Thanks Mr 56! So young!
Wow, great video. Loving the depth of your understanding!
Glad it was helpful!
Thanks for the detailed explanation of the memory swap on apple M1. I have noticed that using a memory cleaning application like Memory clean 2 or similar program will push more data to be written on your SSD . So I believe using these applications will increase the data written on your SSD just by pressing the clean button which does no magic to the RAM, it only moves data from RAM to SSD even when your RAM is not under pressure. We would be better off if we let macOS do its magic in managing memory then using some random third party application that does nothing special.
Best vids indeed, super enjoyable and educational
martctl takes ONE device name as the final command-line argument.
Lovely in-depth video. Helped ease my nerves
Cool!
Perfect explanation. I love your way of explaining things!!! Thank you Mark! :-)
My pleasure!
I'm using my Macbook air "256 GB _ 8 GB" for "20 days" TBW=630 (32GB/day). Not a huge deal but I will be more careful and will observe the following days , although mind that we tend to write a lot more data when we get a new device, so no worries .
Good numbers!
wow this is amazing, the explanation was clear and the video was very informative, keep up with the good job! (I even subscribed :) )
Thanks for the sub!
Great video! Thanks for sharing this information. I'm a heavier user on my 1tb m1pro 16. I'm using 97.7gb a day on average. I will say that my computer has been using much less memory since a recent update so I'm sure that is helping me stay out of swap. SMART still shows 0% usage in 130 days of use. I'm happy to know that I will get a long life out of this computer and be able to pass it on for life after me.
thanks for your explanation Ik have a 256 GB en have it sinds 22 febr. I have written in total 1110GB, that's about 39 / 40 gb per day... I'm safe! Thanks!!
Good numbers
#only regret is not having come across your site earlier #algorithm
Great job explaning this.
Thanks!
Your video was great
Thank you! You are a fast watcher... its just gone up!
@@MarkPayneAudio I watch all videos at 1.75 speed, unless it is a song.
First time ever watching your channel, will be back. Excellent explanation. 10/10 with a little bit of background history too. By the way, you are the first person I’ve ever seen on RUclips to use an iPad Pro in a way that’s more than just a “teleprompter” let alone the Apple Pencil and certainly the first to screen capture from it rather than using an overhead camera shot.👍🏼👏🏼👏🏼 Out of curiosity what are you using to cast your iPad screen for capture? 🤷🏼♂️✌🏼
Yes, when I teach in a classroom I whiteboard a lot so this seemed to be a natural alternative for me. It took a while to find a WB that worked for me and this is MS Whiteboard, part of 365. I just screen record it on the iPad ... with audio so that I can sync it later in FCP.
@@MarkPayneAudio you do it seamlessly; so much so that I was fooled into asking the wrong question. Honestly thought you were capturing on the fly rather than merging in the final edit. Maybe you could look into doing such & cut a step out in your workflow - capture over USB-C from your iPad Pro.
Arh... well I do capture on the fly. What you see me type on camera is what you are seeing on the capture screen. I have to merge and sync 4 elements. 1. The recorded audio... from a studio mic above me off camera (mostly ! :-)) 2. The main camera, 3.The screen captures from any demo computers 4. The whiteboard.
All the calculations are done by Apple. Obviously, they are smarter than everyone on and visiting this channel including myself.
But then a sudden death always happens... And when it happens, PC laptops can cope with just buying another SSD module. But not Macbooks.
That's the primary difference.
Excelent video, congratulations.
Thank u so much. It is very useful information, and a very clear explanation. Great job, sir.
You are most welcome
This video is awesome. Thanks a lot for a great work! Subscribed 🤝
Thank you for this explanation
You are welcome!
Well, my iMac 27.0 TB written, which works out to about 180 GB/day, which sounds about right for my usage, which is going to be hell of a lot more than most people see. 0 used from the wear pool.
I've got a 2 TB drive, half full. My only real worry is running out of disk space. Well, no, it's running out of USB ports to plug an external SSD into...
Part of the reason I listened to the whole thing was to understand what people's concerns were-just the generic write cycle issue, or if there was something driving a high rate. In all my years of heavy usage even with smaller, older SSDs, I've never once seen an SSD wear out, or fail in any way. I'm not denying it's an issue to consider in certain circumstances, just that my experience is far beyond the typical usage and wholly favors SSDs. Magnetic drives' record has improved enormously since the days when we cleaned heads on 80 MB washing machines, but "hard drive failure" is something I just don't think about anymore. There are so many other risks to our data to motivate backups!
I knew 99+% of the material, so the pacing was slow enough for me to pay attention to how you were explaining. Every time I'd think "but you need to explain..." you'd be explaining it before I'd finish the thought. For example, cylinders... You did a really nice job (I think; I'm not the right test subject!)
The big thing I didn't know about was smartmontools. Thanks for that!
Thanks Bob, your comments mean a lot. I too remember head cleaning! You just reminded me. We should have mentioned sector skew from one surface to another which allowed the data placement to be shifted positionally in the cylinder to allow for head switch latency, that just came back to me.
@@MarkPayneAudio Yup. At an even lower level of detail was the low-level formatting with bit patterns to synchronize the bit clock, the sector address, so you could know you were reading/about to write the correct sector, a gap so you didn't overwrite the sector address, an ECC checksum at the end of the data capable of repairing something like 11 bits of consecutive error. A lot of details I don't remember anymore.
Most of the time you could take all that as a given, but with a new model of drive, you would sometimes have to figure it all out.
Disk controllers weren't as reliable then, either. I remember a few years later, when sealed "Winchester" drives were the norm, visiting a customer site with an unbootable system. Found in block 0 (which held a directory of bootable images), that a defective disk controller had written a 1 bit every N bits (the size of the write shift-register) whether it needed it or not.
Replaced the controller, then set about figuring out which bits should have been zero instead, fixed them, and it booted.
It was always kind of cool to identify a specific hardware failure from observed behavior at the software level. Found an ALU gate failure affecting a lesser-used operation once.
The reliability levels required of modern hardware are astounding. This iMac can do in 1 second what would have taken hours on the system I started with (not counting the GPU!) and do it day after day without a single error.
My Mac Mini 2018 has less than 15GB DWPD. Bought it in Dec. 2018 and it has a 128GB SSD. So, even with the smallest SSD option I'm good. However it also shows me that my system writes less than half the data than yours on a M1 Mac. FYI, I only use the internal SSD for the OS and applications. All my files are on external devices.
We think a lot of this is about M1 systems. The worry is that they are VERY efficient with memory management allowing the systems to run performantly with very little RAM for big tasks. The internal SSD is used as backup swap space maybe more than would be expected and some users see BIG write rates as a result. That is the theory. You are probably not going to see this issue on older hardware anyway.
Discovered your channel last night and I gotta say what a gem! I love your teaching style!
Welcome! and Thank you!
Great info…but has resulted in a bit of a worry for me.
4 month old m1 iMac Done 190TB of writes (1.5TB a day).
I only do basic tasks- Mail, Safari, Firefox, office (Libre) etc. No video editing, photo editing etc.
Health already shows 10% used. At this rate it’s only going to last around 3 years.
Humm this could end up being an expensive mistake!
That's a lot of usage. 8Gb system? Have you identified the big virtual memory process?
@@MarkPayneAudio yes 8GB system. I have monitored in the past 8 days (since my post above) and the writes seem minimal (10GB a day, so a factor of over 100 less than the 4 month average). So ….
- maybe whatever was causing the issue has been fixed by an update?
- maybe just some particular sequence of operations or app usage results in massive writes and I just haven’t done said sequence in past week?
Either way the talk of this issue having been fixed by macOS 10.4 (as mentioned in a few places) is clearly not true as I’ve always had a more recent OS than that.
I will continue monitoring. I’ve not tried to actually provoke writes by starting dozens of apps, opening huge photo edits etc etc.
Sounds like it.
I've had my M1 for ~345 days:
67.5 TB writes comes out to ~195GB/day
1TB drive and usage shows only 2%
There's also the fact that SSDs are fickle when the free space is less than 30% on a drive. My friend bought a MacBook Air based on my advice and she's getting insane 40GB+/day writes. All she uses it is for streaming content and almost nothing else.
interesting video, thank you!
Glad you liked it!
Just tried it on my MacBook Air M2 which I got with 10-core GPU and 512GB but only 8GB RAM because it was the only model available besides the pure base one.
And I surely was slightly concerned because of all the stupid articles about the whole topic but for no reason.
I currently have a total written of 1.63TB in 38 days. That's less than 43GB per day which is far away from the about 156GB I could get each day based on the 512GB.
Hey Mark. This was such a nice video, congrats !.
Nice edition btw.
This might be offtrack but I was wondering… could you do a video talking a bit about how to take care of the M1’s battery ?. There are a couple of videos out there on youtube but I just love your way of explaining stuff !!!
Thank you so much, and cheers from Chile >:D
Not sure I have that planned!
its been a week I bought the MBA 8gb + 512 gb variant so far I have never seen anything huge in terms of swap memory..I am a medium user.
If I could get 3 years out of my M1 MacBook Air Base model I just got, I'll be very pleased.
Thanks for sharing this info. Very usefull 🙂
Glad it was helpful!
@@MarkPayneAudio That info was cristal clear and we should all be able to know that before buy any laptop. Can't apreceate enough the fact that you took the time to help us out. Thank you very much.
I have been wondering if there is any advantage from working with certain apps installed on a external drive so we can spare the internal ssd.
There is a report that someone in China is able to de-solder and upgrade the SSD. So, I guess, there is some hope that the whole machine won't be fried if the SSD fails prematurely.
Not to mention that Apple will try to protect its reputation if a lot of SSD start failing by offering some sort of warranty replacement program.
So, what's the expected life span for a 512GB SSD? 750TBW or 1PBW? Thanks.
Wow, I was just here to get tips on running Logic Pro. Now, I have a firm understanding on how HDs & SSDs work, woohoo thanks!!:)).
Happy to help!
Finally, It's a nice and technical expression instead of empty words. Thank you very much. In short, my MBP ( 16/256) won't die in five years If I limit myself to 75GB usage per day. Good to hear that. So, I have one more question. Will SSD slow down over time?
I think this very unlikely and super difficult to measure... so no! :-)
Thank you! Nice Video!
Thanks for the explanation 👍
No problem 👍
Excellent and well explained!
Glad it was helpful!
Please have a quick read and reply.
Available Spare: 100%
Available Spare Threshold: 99%
Percentage Used: 3%
Data Units Read: 119,134,293 [60.9 TB]
Data Units Written: 98,124,552 [50.2 TB]
I have had the machine for year now. So according to this tool, 50TB is only 3% of the total health?
Dividing 100\3%(health) = 33.3
Multiply 50.2TB*33.3 = 1673TB/1.63PB
So is 1673TB/1.63PB the total expected TBW of my specific drive?
Awesome explanation as ever, thank you Mark! I have been watching your videos a lot now, and I must say, I am really enjoying these.This is for all as a question. I am on the verge of buying a Macbook, the only thing that I need suggestion with is; will Minitab software and Power Bi work on it? I have been researching a lot about this, but have not got a definite answer and that is stalling my first Macbook purchase. I would buy the 512 / 8. Would parallels do the trick for me, not sure
Sorry that I am not using Parallels or the other s/w you mention so I cannot add value there!
Thanks much for the reply Mark 👍
Interesting, Although I've just done the calculations, and based on my swap usage, I estimate I only have around 400 days lifetime on my SSD. (Brand new mac btw). I have AppleCare and plan to upgrade after it ends anyway in 3 years, so I am not that concerned.
Edit: for anyone wondering, my mac is 500GB and has used 3TB Data written in kernal_task (swap) in the last 7 days alone. Not including the 90TB Data units written in total so far for my 80-day old mac.
i use windows 11, 1tb ssd, 25.3 tb written, 404 days, 63gb per day
Great detailed video, sorry I only watched the last 10 minutes video, but how much RAM do you have in your machine?
16GB
Why edge and chrome is writting into ssd while browsing ? is it. a known issueS?
Dont know! I use safari!
@@MarkPayneAudio thanks you
Omg … you are awesome. Great great video!
Amazing. Thank you!
Thank you too!
Brilliant. Thanks Mark.
Very welcome
60gb per day on 256gb sdd...