- I've been reporting on the topic of excessive SSD usage
on the M1 Macs specifically since November.
If you haven't watched my other videos
let me quickly bring you up to speed.
Many users have reported
that their Macs have written a ton of data
to their internal SSDs in a very short amount of time.
The concern is that each SSD has a finite lifespan
that is they may start to degrade or even fail
after a certain amount of data is written.
This is generally referred to as the drives TBW,
historically though the amount of data
that needs to be written
to get anywhere near this level is huge.
So it's never really been an issue.
Recently however, Macs have been utilizing something
called swap memory seemingly much more than usual
which I explained further in my previous video.
After doing some research into this topic
and spending a lot of time testing on my own Macs
I think I've narrowed down the cause of this issue
and I've developed a method to avoid most of it
or even fix it altogether.
Spoiler alert, make sure you are on the latest version
of MacOS as of today,
and try not to use unoptimized apps
that are running on Rosetta 2.
Now with this strategy I was able
to reduce my swap memory usage by 75%,
going from close to 400 gigabytes of swap memory
being written to my SSD each day
to under a hundred gigabytes.
And in this video, I'm going to show you how I did it.
Firstly, let me show you
what excessive swap usage actually looks like.
In these screenshots you can see
I started tracking the total bytes written value
for the kernel task process in activity monitor
at exactly 12:33 a.m On the 8th of March.
The kernel task process is responsible
for swap memory among other things.
Less than three hours, and many, many YouTube videos later
at 3:12 a.m, don't judge me, I'm a night owl,
that value had increased from 3.23 terabytes
to 3.64 terabytes or 410 gigabytes of swapped data written
to my internal SSD in under three hours.
This is from relatively light Firefox, Chrome, Discord
and Mail usage.
I cross-referenced this using a program called DriveDX
and sure enough, it matched.
You can also use something called smartmontools
to find this information, but it was interesting to see
that Apple's own reporting tool activity monitor
matched up perfectly with a third party app, DriveDX
and gave exact same results.
That's a pretty strong indication
that this information is correct.
Now, I don't know about you, but that's an insane amount
of written data and is not normal at all.
That being said, as you're about to see
when we dive into my base model M1 MacBook Air,
on average, over the last few weeks
there was roughly three to 400 gigabytes being written
to the SSD every day including swap memory.
That's about 120 terabytes per year.
Now we don't know exactly what SSDs Apple uses
in their and M1 Macs,
but we do know they are very high quality
and likely have a TBW of anywhere between 600 to 1000 plus,
that means even at this insane rate of usage
I'd likely get a minimum of five plus years out of my SSD
before starting to see noticeable issues,
likely much longer than that.
So what could be causing this excessive usage exactly?
Well, let's take a closer look
on my base model M1 MacBook Air
with eight gigabytes of RAM and a 256 gigabyte SSD.
Okay, so this is my base model M1 MacBook Air,
obviously with just the 256 gigabyte hard drive.
Now, first things first
what we're gonna do is we gonna come into the Apple logo.
We're gonna click about this Mac.
You can see here currently I'm on version 11.1 of MacOS,
we'll come back to that later.
We'll go to system report
and then we'll come down here to the software section.
You can see the times since I last restarted
this Mac was 23 days ago.
So this computer has not been shut down for 23 days.
It's just been put to sleep.
And if we now close this down
and we open up this screenshot from a week ago
you can see the date here is the 8th of March.
And the date now is the 15th of March.
And I wanna draw your attention
to this particular process here, the kernel task.
Now I have discussed this kernel task briefly
in my last video
but just pay attention here to the bytes written.
Now this is bytes written to the SSD
and that is 3.19 terabytes seven days ago.
And if I now open up activity monitor,
you can see that that has now increased to 7.83 terabytes.
So that is 4.64 terabytes in
under seven days of a relatively light usage.
Now, how do I define light usage? Well, I'll show you.
As you can see here
I really don't have that much stuff open.
Obviously I have some things like Firefox,
I've got a few small little apps
and if I actually open up Firefox, you can see here
that I really don't have that many tabs open.
I have no more than about 10 to 15 Firefox tabs open.
I will have the Mail App with just a single account
and only about a hundred or 200 emails in that account.
I'll also sometimes have Google Chrome
but only one or two windows open
if anything, very occasionally I'll have Discord.
And sometimes I might be using the notes app,
but that is literally it I've done nothing else
over the last month.
Just very, very light usage.
That's what I mainly use this particular laptop for.
I don't do much hardcore editing on here if any,
it's really just stuff like Firefox.
And you can see right now, I'm not really using a whole lot
of memory I'm currently using just
under two gigabytes of swap, which is totally normal.
Again, guys swap is a normal thing, it's good.
I'm not trying to say swap is bad.
However, I will say that 7.83 terabytes written
to the internal SSD in under 23 days
is quite a lot in my opinion
Comparing the DriveDX results from my video two weeks ago
to today, you can see I wrote an extra 7.5 terabytes
in two weeks or over 500 gigabytes per day every single.
Now this is with about eight hours of light
to moderate usage and mostly web browsing type stuff.
So like I said before guys,
I have a hunch at what this particular issue could be.
So if you look here in the kernel tasks
now this is responsible for a lot of things
but a lot of it is also swap and that's
what's gonna be the majority of the bytes written.
And I honestly think this issue is coming from Rosetta 2.
Obviously the Rosetta 2
is what translates non-M1 compatible apps,
which allows you to use them.
So apps like Firefox, Discord, those kinds of things.
They're not natively M1 apps yet, unlike Google Chrome
and of course, obviously the native Apple apps like Safari.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to shut everything down.
I'm also going to update my software version
to the most up-to-date version of MacOS.
Right now I'm on 11.1.
So I'm going to update this.
I'm gonna restart the Mac
and I'm only going to use either Apple Silicon updated apps,
such as Google Chrome
or the native Mac apps like Safari and Mail.
And I'm not gonna use apps like Firefox or Discord,
because I just wanna see if we can actually
reduce this particular kernel task result here of 7.83.
I'm just gonna see if I can get that down as low
as possible into more of what I would consider normal usage.
So let me do that real quick
and I will actually see you guys in a couple of days
once I've had a chance to test it out and see how it goes.
Okay guys, so it is now just under three days
since I last recorded that video.
And as you can see if we check the kernel task
in activity monitor,
the bytes written value is 291 gigabytes
and come over here to DriveDX.
And you may remember from the last video
I was at 27.6 data units written.
And as you can see, I'm only at 28.
So that's only 400 gigabytes written to the hard drive
in the last three days, which really isn't too bad
'cause I have been doing a lot of work.
Now to give you an idea of what exactly I've had opened.
Well, I've had Safari, I've had all of my tabs in Safari.
You can see all the notes for this video here.
I've been doing a lot of WordPress stuff,
a lot of YouTube videos.
I watch a ton of YouTube videos.
I've also had Google Chrome open the entire time.
I've had probably four or five tabs open on Google Chrome.
I've also had Apple Mail open and from time to time
I would likely use Discord and Word and also some Photoshop
but then when I finished using those apps
I would shut them down straight away.
So it's good to see that I'm now using
under a hundred gigabytes a day compared to
between three to 500 gigabytes a day prior to this.
So like I said previously, I think it's a combination
of Rosetta 2 and unoptimized apps.
Now just hold on a minute before you pick up your Pitchfork
and try and burn down the Apple head office.
You got to understand that Apple has no control
over these third party apps.
If they require more memory to run
or they need Rosetta 2 so be it.
User experience is the most important thing.
That being said though, Apple should be putting pressure
on the developers of these apps to release updated versions.
I also think Apple should release some kind
of official statement, the very least saying they're aware
of the concerns in the community and are looking into it.
So what is the solution?
Well, as you guys have seen here
try to use native Apple apps wherever possible,
especially browsers, this is important.
So definitely do use Safari instead
of Google Chrome or Firefox.
Firefox specifically, I've found
to be really, really bad, at least on Apple Silicon.
The other thing you can try is download M1 optimized apps,
including DaVinci Resolve 17.1,
I believe it's still in Beta,
but it is out I've been using it in a few videos.
And if you do have to use Chrome
you can actually download a Apple Silicon version of Chrome.
But again, guys apps like Chrome
and also all the Adobe apps.
They're absolutely horrible.
They're completely unoptimized even
on windows and prior versions of Mac.
So try to either limit usage or shut them down
when you're not using them or just not use them at all.
Now, continuing on from that
obviously you're going to have to use unoptimized apps
like Photoshop or Discord, for example.
So if that's the case, that's totally fine.
And with this particular figure here
that was with Word, Photoshop, some Discord
all open at the same time and being used.
But again, I used it and then I quit it
as soon as I was done using it.
So I honestly think this is a pretty easy fix.
It doesn't require anything super drastic
like disabling swap or anything like that.
It just requires you to slightly modify your workflow.
Now it is important to mention
that these steps are only for the short term and only
for those currently experiencing excessive swap usage
or those that are worried about it.
I do believe this issue will be resolved very soon
by either Apple releasing more software updates
and more third-party apps being updated
to run natively on Apple Silicon.
So for the next couple of weeks,
just try to follow the tips I've just mentioned,
and you should be fine.
And I honestly think in a couple of weeks, or maybe a couple
of months at the Macs, everything's going to be fine.
So what I'm gonna do now is just a little test.
I'm gonna move all of these tabs
from Safari over to Firefox.
I'm gonna open up Discord again,
I'm gonna be using Word in the background
rather than using Docs in the cloud like I have been before
and I'm gonna give it about half an hour
and we're gonna come back and see
what the bytes written up here is looking like.
So at the moment it's 293.07 gigabytes.
So I'll see you guys in about half an hour.
Okay guys, so it's been about half an hour here.
And as you can see the bytes written
has increased from 293.07 to 303.84.
So that is almost 11 gigabytes in half an hour
which really isn't too crazy.
What I've noticed is it's actually a lot better now
that I've actually updated MacOS
because prior to the update
that was just going out of control
and it probably would have been close
to three or four times that.
So what I'm gonna do
is I'm actually gonna end this video here
and I'm gonna do some more testing on this topic.
What I'll probably do is I'll go back
to what I was doing before.
So I'll use unoptimized apps like Firefox and Discord
and I'll give it a week or two, see how it goes
and I'll update you guys with another video.
Anyway, apart from that, thank you for watching,
any comments or questions, let me know down below
and I'll catch you in the next one.