The new M1 chip in Apple's latest MacBooks offers excellent performance and battery life. However, it may not be so good for storage drives.

On Twitter and several other forums, users of the latest MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, and Mac Mini models have reported much higher than expected wear rates on their solid state drives (SSDs). If these figures are accurate and this trend continues, the lifespan of Apple's latest laptops could be worryingly short.

The reliability of SSDs decreases over time as the memory cells in the drive are used and reused, eventually resulting in slow response times and data corruption. Therefore, manufacturers guarantee that SSDs will operate up to a specific total bytes written (TBW).

It is important to note that SSDs do not fail immediately upon reaching the guaranteed TBW; the TBW only indicates the threshold at which problems are likely to start occurring.

Earlier this month, Tesla was forced to recall 135,000 vehicles after the SSD-like flash memory storage chip in the center console wore out rapidly, shutting down the car's infotainment system.

Mac power users use an app called Smart Monitoring Tools from the macOS terminal to check how many bytes their MacBook SSDs are writing. This is a somewhat complicated procedure that requires downloading a third-party app, so we do not recommend trying it yourself unless you are a very confident user.

In the case of the Macs tested in these threads, one Mac Mini user claims to have written 165 TB of data in just two months of use; compared to an equivalent retail SSD from Toshiba (which supplies SSDs for the MacBook), 10% of the total guaranteed TBW equivalent.

In theory, the SSDs in Apple's M1 MacBooks should guarantee reliable use for about five years. However, this rapid usage rate has reduced the reliable lifespan to less than two years.

This 10% figure seems to be an outlier; as seen in the MacRumors forum and the LinusTechTips forum thread, most users complaining about this issue report 2-3% usage. Nevertheless, this is a higher figure than one would expect for a brand new device.

To make matters worse, this is an internal drive soldered to the Mac's mainboard. There is no way to replace it without replacing other parts, making repairs more expensive than necessary.

Hector Martin, a Linux developer for M1 Mac, stated on Twitter that the problem could be attributed to the swap file feature of macOS. Swap files are an integral part of Unix-derived operating systems like macOS.

If Macs rely on SSDs for more processes than expected, this may explain why SSD usage is higher than expected, especially on models with the base 8GB RAM rather than the optional 16GB RAM.

Similarly, there could be a problem with the reported numbers. This could be due to a bug somewhere in macOS Big Sur that incorrectly calculates SSD usage. There may also be a problem with the accuracy of the third-party tools used by these users to calculate write rates, which may be misinterpreting certain values.

If you own one of these M1 MacBooks, you need not worry. It seems that only the few users who store the most data are in danger of actually running out of SSDs due to this programming quirk, provided that the Mac is really writing this much data to the SSD.

An informal statement to AppleInsider from a source within Apple said: "We are investigating the report, but the SMART data reported in the third-party utility is about wear on our SSDs and is incorrect and incorrect.

No official response has been received yet. However, if the problem continues to be reported, Apple will be forced to take action before its early laptop product lines with specially designed processors gain an unfortunate reputation for unreliability. Hopefully what has been reported so far is a common cause that has nothing to do with Mac drives.

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