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Apple resolved M1 Mac SSD wear reporting issue in macOS 11.4

Last updated

Previous issues surrounding reporting tools reporting heavy wear on SSDs in Apple Silicon Macs now appear to be fixed in macOS 11.4

Solid State Drives (SSDs) can only be written to so many times before they can become unusable, but it takes many years. A series of reports in February 2021 about the SSDs in M1 Macs, however, appeared to show that their lifespan was considerably reduced.

At the time, an AppleInsider source within Apple, not authorized to speak on behalf the company, told us that it was a data reporting error within the tools used to report SSD wear. According to that source, it was not believed to be an actual hardware issue with the SSD, nor were the SSDs aging notably faster than prior because of RAM swap or other reasons.

Now that same source has told AppleInsider that the issue has been fixed in the latest release of macOS. AppleInsider can also now independently confirm that macOS 11.4 is reporting proper uptime statistics as well, where it was not previously.

Separately, users on Twitter including one of the developers working on the Linux port to Apple Silicon, developer Hector Martin, have now also reported that the issue is resolved.

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Update: The fix was originally implemented in betas of macOS 11.4. It was made available to the public in the macOS 11.4 release.

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13 Comments

commentzilla 10 Years · 777 comments

Yep, I already spotted this. Swap memory usage is also way down.

robaba 4 Years · 228 comments

What will all the trolls complain about now?

ppietra 14 Years · 288 comments

Yep, I already spotted this. Swap memory usage is also way down.

Was the Write value corrected to a lower value?

9secondkox2 8 Years · 3148 comments

I wonder what this "fix" has done to performance. 

Doesn't seem to just have been a reporting issue. It was actually being utilized more.

any testing to compare before and after?

nicholfd 6 Years · 828 comments

Yep, I already spotted this. Swap memory usage is also way down.
"an AppleInsider source within Apple, not authorized to speak on behalf the company, told us that it was a data reporting error within the tools used to report SSD wear"

Reading is hard...