Some M1 Mac users in February reported their Macs appeared to be writing an excessive amount of data to their SSD drives. Apple has reportedly fixed the issue in macOS 11.4.
Users on Twitter and other forums had reported that their M1 Macs were experiencing extremely high drive writes over a short space of time. In some severe cases, the M1 Macs had apparently consumed as much as 10 to 13% of the maximum warrantable total bytes written (TBW) value of its SSD.
Solid-state drives, such as those used in Macs, can only be written to a certain number of times before they become unstable and unreliable. While the software is designed to spread the writing evenly across a drive’s memory cells, they do eventually reach a point where they can no longer reliably hold data. The indication of these reports was that the drives were exhausting their ability to hold data quicker than they should.
At the time of the initial reports, an inside Apple source told AppleInsider that it was a data reporting error within the tools used to report SSD wear. The source said that it wasn’t believed to be an actual hardware issue with the SSD, nor were the SSDs aging faster due to RAM swap or other issues.
Now AppleInsider’s source tells them that the issue has been fixed in the latest version of macOS. The publication also says it has confirmed that macOS 11.4 is reporting proper uptime statistics as well, where it was not previously.
At least one developer, Hector Martin, also reports that the issue is resolved.
