The other thing as to why you get a larger SSD than you think you need is an issue with wear levelling. The TBW metric is oversimplified. The SSD has a number of blocks (say 1000 for a simple example), each of which can be rewritten 1000 times. What happens if the SSD keeps rewriting the same block rather than sharing the load? If your SSD is 80% full, then all that writing and rewriting is spread over the 20% of blocks remaining, which means that those blocks get worn out way quicker than the TBW lifespan metric would indicate. I'm writing this on a refurb Thinkpad I got off eBay for £150, which has an nvme slot. It's current SSD is small (250GB) and is about 60% full with all my music and other software installed. But as and when that becomes an issue, it is an M.2 SSD, so I can replace it. The RAM is 4GB fixed plus one slot (currenty 4GB but I can stick a 16GB stick in at some point). I can understand fixing the memory to the CPU (better speed/latency). Having two tiers of memory (fast RAM on the CPU and secondary RAM in slots on the motherboard) would complicate things. But soldered storage is a cardinal sin. I have a friend who is mac only. Her current Mac has served her well for 10 years. A new mac will cost a lot, and this video points out what I'm very concerned about, namely that she won't get 10 years out of a new mac. 5 if she's lucky. So the cost is amortised over half the time, so is effectively twice the price per-year compared to her current mac. More and more Macs are becoming a means for Apple to rinse the rich, and to hell with everybody else.
TBW is per entire drive capacity, before failure. So divide that with the number of TB of the drive and then convert to GB. You then get how many TB a single GB of free space on your SSD can be overwritten with before that GB dies.
Maybe SSD companies have clever tech that randomly rearranges the stored data to different datablocks to prevent the issue your saying... doesn't seem that absurd of an idea hahaha
Louis Rossman also covered this issue with the failed texas intruments component failure. Its absolutely shameful how apple designed the logic board with no abily to protect the ssd from being destroyed
It would be pretty easy to clamp that converter output to ground if the voltage output exceeds a certain level, to protect the SSDs. The converter chip is probably being used too close to its rated limit, leading to eventual premature failure. The SSDs themselves should be mounted on a socketed sub-PCB to facilitate their eventual replacement and/or upgrade, if needed. To do otherwise is just greed forced into bad design practice for higher profit, from overpricing the value of these commodity SSD chips, as installed.
And guess what , this video states the ssd is replaceable but sadly it is not as the bios and firmware is also loaded from some sections of the drive hence the reason why it doesn't even post to screen with the dead ssd , older models you could at least see some picture even with a dead ssd, even louis Rossman covered it and said the ssd was non replaceable....I currently have a 16 inch 2019 with this same issue , after diagnosis, I discovered all ssd chips are shorted to ground (even after removing the Texas chipset)
As an Apple Certified Technician you nailed this topic very well and very informative, but… 1) You made the swapping issue more dramatic and dynamic than it usually is. Yes, swapping is bad, but it's not as constant and dynamic, meaning that the "200MB" swap file is not constantly being written back and forth, it's the amount of swap being used. And Swap memory is not and does not act like Random Access Memory, that is wrong, it's a temporary inactive "cache" part of the used memory stored for later use and to give space back for immediate needs. 2) You left out an important issue about SSD space and longevity, filling up the drive and keeping it that way as your main and only storage is bad, very bad, as there is little room for the OS (and you) to perform common tasks and for the SSD controller to execute wear leveling. Leading to a premature wear of cells. 3) The type of NAND flash (MLC, TLC, QLC) chips have a huge impact and it's not simple or short to explain here, a good excuse to investigate and make another educational video. In short, avoid QLC based SSDs. Apple uses TLC from all the manufacturers that supply the chips, fortunately. 4) TBW is not an "end of life" point, but an average MTBF (meantime between failure) measurement and the majority of drives can exceed this "lifespan" metric many times. Your example proves it as the drive had 80% life left after doubling its TBW. In theory and statically in practice (not counting manufacturing defects) the life of the SSD in soldered MacBooks will out pass the lifespan of the machine by the average user ownership period of 4-5 years for an 8GB SSD. But if the TBW is higher, better (a larger drive will always be recommended as you mentioned in the video, double that if you add more RAM, but of course this is expensive when it comes to Apple's pricing scheme). Good video!
Can you help me understand when the Mac says that x amount of MB is being used in the swap? Is that.. like 200mb/second? .. like always adding 200mb? Or just 200mb... sitting there not changing.. until the figure does change? So if that number stays the same for 4 hours and I close the computer for the day.. the total MB written to the drive for the day will have been 200mb? But what if at hour 2 it drops to 100mb? Is the total then 300 for the day? 100? spitting the difference at 150?
Swap memory is actually used as real RAM. The OS certainly tries hard to move the inactive parts of the memory to swap while keeping frequently used parts on physical RAM, but it doesn't succeed every time in prioritising those data.
@@mootsym Commonly the less swap the better. Some people have a 10GB swap file on their M1 Macbooks with 8GB RAM, though not enough time has passed for those M1 Macbooks to start dying from SSD failure en masse. It's certainly not 10GB/second. But swap storage acts any way it pleases and it usually writes more randomly than not, meaning that if MacOS wants to write some data from the RAM to the swap file, it certainly would, without really discerning what data it is. Apple made a conscious decision to _specifically_ use swap storage as if it's extra RAM. No one else does that in the same scope as how Apple does it. They knew what they were doing, and what they were doing is screwing their customers over.
This is the best way that I've seen the SSD problem explained. Everyone must buy an external SSD and use the internal one as little as possible. Thank you.
Gonna need right to repair. Or some massive class action type hardware failure that finally wakes people up. Still using a 2011 and feel forced to look back to pc after all these years. Definitely a shame.
@@vladduh3164buy a cheap Windows laptop. That are slow and just be slower over time. Plastic shit that be broken just because you lift it in the screen ? Or an android phone that are made of glass and crack if you lose it. I don’t know how many android I have tried before I move to iPhone. Or how many times I have delete all on my windows pc and install windows again because it’s to slow to use. Or how many windows laptops I have broken because it hit the floor or lift it up in the screen and the screen it’s broken. I have a 10 year old iPad that’s still works. And my 11 year old MacBook that I have trow around a lot and now it’s time for and MacBook Air. Tell me one tablet that’s still works after 10 year or a window laptop that’s not made of cheap plastic with long battery time. Yes Apple products are expensive but the are have good build quality. Try it and you will understand
@@kennethvalbjoernmy last 24 months with my pc. 2 high end asus mobos dead and rma’d but asus being asus overcharged me for the first one and lost my second one and blamed me for it. Msi 4090 melted cable and also took my seasonic 1000watt psu with it. Where is the money I saved?
I think upcoming EU rules will oblige manufacturers like Apple to make easy repairable products in order to combat e-waste and restore consumer rights. So that would mean replaceable SSDs and batteries for laptops. These manufacturers (like Apple) will do this only when they have to in order to comply to the law (like using USB-C ports).
This is an amazing breakdown. To all my mac mini family, i'm using a dock with an external SSD. I am not saving anything on my internal SSD. All downloads go directly to my SSD within the dock. Glad I found this video early.
@@notsure1135 Good call bro. Internal SSD is only for apps. Should last us a while. They are starting to do Soldered SSd swaps, so we just have to survive until it gets mainstream. Apple is annoying but these M2 computers are the best i have ever seen, literately no lag.
@@bruxolabs-thedefitribunal I got the M1 Max studio with 512GB and you can swap those out if same size which is fkn handy. I am gonna source a few of those in the next year for the inevitable burnout of the ssd. Hope I get some life out of this setup.
@@notsure1135 nice bro. I was watching a video by another youtuber who was breaking down the math of failure. If you go the external SSD route, it should last you a really long time because you will not be swapping a lot, and the data storage on the internal will be distributed more widely. Happy we found this out now, rather than later.
It will make no difference. The SSD where the OS is installed is where the swapping takes place. Saving downloaded files to the external drive will have minimal impact - it's the swapping that is responsible for 99% of writes.
The best explanation of how an SDD works, why they fail, and what you can do to prolong their life that I have found. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I will now be making changes to both my iMac and PC setups to prolong the life of the SSDs that I have in both systems.
Nice video! At 13:09 RAM means Random Access Memory. Random means that you can read or write any (random) location in the memory with the same access time. Compare this to Sequential Memory like a tape drive where you have to wind the tape to the correct position to access the data.
I have 2 older MacBooks, a 2012 and 2009. Both are running Linux Mint 21.1 , both have maxed RAM and both have 1TB SATA SSDs. They run and look great. I also have a fully repairable/upgradable i7 Framework laptop 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD also running Mint. Finally, I have a 2020 M1 MacBook Air 256gb which will be my last. It will be Framework & Linux from now on. My iPhone 12 will be my last iPhone too.
I wont buy mac any more, after speding 3800£ for m1max 64gb ram, the computer is slow, and wont work as should, over the year of useage, and battery is decreese to 89% joke
You're absolutely right. As a person with fairly good computer knowledge I knew about this problem even before I watched your video and commented this sad fact on nearly every LTT video about Macs I watched. I did however underestimate how many died that early because of the SSD reaching its maximum write cycles. It's damn infuriating and shocking. Thanks for helping to quantify the extent of the problem !
@@rcpmaca lot! any MacBook or MacBook pro with on board ssd over 5 years old is likely to die as customers buy them for ram heavy apps like video editing, graphic design, music production, any where user stored data to near maximum for extended period of time, that would include buying used logic boards to repair a dead Mac. Yeah don't know how many. You maybe right no one keeping count. Yet it's a lot, and eventually maybe all... that is shocking.
@@brucemercury Your SSD is not RAM. RAM is volatile storage only used to store the state of programs currently running and clears itself as soon the computer is powered down. RAM doesn't have the limited write/erase cycles like an SSD. SSDs are persistent storage that stores long term and even when your computer is turned off.
@@brando4526 yeah and where do you think the Mac will write to when RAM is no longer enough? to /var/vm/swapfile* from 1GB to nGB of RAM help written to the SSD.
@@danilodistefanis5990 Yes, I am aware that SSD is used when RAM is filled up. But that's not something you want to do all the time because it can wear out your SSD faster and SSD is not as fast as RAM. RAM and SSD are two very different kinds of memory.
Hello, first of all it is a unique content. You explained very useful things. But a TBW lifespan doesn’t mean that SSD is going to die. It means that the manufacturer will no longer give guarantee to SSD. There is a lot of working SSDs which has already completed their TBW lifespan years ago. It is more about the breakdown of the storage cells in SSD. In normal conditions, most probably a user can use the SSD for couple more years after completing the TBW lifespan. It was a great content thanks to you.
Youre right! When we uploaded this video, we already clarified some facts regarding the TBW to this video description, of what the actual scenario when the TBW limit's reached. and what you're saying is completely true, as its not always die 100%, but since we've had some SSDs behave erratically when TBW limit's reached on these Macs, so we'd like to call it dead. And as a logic board technician's perspective, when we repair MacBooks with dead SSD issue, ETHICALLY we will never install bad TBW SSDs to your client's Mac. (because in the next video, we will explain most of the SSDs need to pulled off from another working Mac - and we don't even have any choice!) and thanks for watching! :)
Still doesn't matter, ssd's also fail before their TBW is reached, and being soldered on, creates the same problem, a useless laptop that CAN'T be fixed
@@michaelkeudel8770I have seen some videos here with people replacing/upgrading the SSDs of M1 MacBooks but it needs advanced technical skills, soldering stations and connection to another Mac to start the MacBook M1 in DFU mode and install macOS.
@@TechAndGuides it needs advanced skills and expensive tools, and an incredibly steady hand, there's no reason a socket can't be there instead. The likely hood of success is very small because the way it's designed. Your storage should NEVER be the deciding factor of when it's time to upgrade YOUR ENTIRE computer.
I don't know if it's intentional or not, but you make the SSD usage ware case sound quite more scary than it actually is. My first ever SSD (a 256GB Samsung 840 PRO) is being used in a PC that almost never shuts down for almost 10 years now. It has 74000 hours of operation, and 58 TBW used, with typical user usage. I don't know if such an old model has 300TBW limit or not, but even if it has 150 TBW (as if it was a modern 128GB SSD) this would mean that it has more or less another 15 years of life in it. It will be 25 years old if it ever reaches to that point! I have had mechanical disks that failed quite sooner than the 10 years mark! The only real issue with Apple is that SSD's are soldered on the board, and it's not easy to replace/upgrade them. That's more of a concern if the SSD goes faulty, rather than if it wears out due to usage and reach it's expected TBW after (most likely) 15 or 20 years.. Especially since Apple declares most of it's products obsolete after 7-8 years of their release (and unfortunately Microsoft copied with it's Windows 11 upgrade policy). IMHO a typical user should just enjoy the ease and convenience SSD's offer, and not live in a constant fear that he may have written a few GB more today on his SSD, or that the movie he downloaded damaged his disc. And finally IMHO unless you need HUGE storage space, external discs belong in the past and should stay there. Granted, USB C protocol is very fast, but external discs are bulky and messy. If my internal disc can fit all the data I need and leave at least 25%-30% of the drive empty, why should I bother to carry around spare discs, remember to connect them, then remember to not move my MAC while the discs are connected (or to not use it on my lap) then remember to eject them, and finally disconnect them? Supposedly MACs are famous for the ease of their usage and the total user experience they offer, no ? PS: I have both a 2021 MBP and a 2021 Asus ROG laptop. The Asus came with 1TB SSD on board. Not only this SSD can be replaced/upgraded, but it also offers a second M.2 slot. So now the Asus has it's original SSD and a second 2TB Samsung 980 M.2 PRO. And the coolest thing is that I didn't had to send it away for the upgrade, nor become an expert to desoldering/soldering components. I just unscrewed 6 screws, put the disc in, screwed the screws back and I was done in less than 5 minutes! Aaaah... Apple! :P
Thanks for the reminder. I just checked my swap file and it was 11GB, despite having 32GB of RAM. Gotta shut things down when I finish, or finish projects more quickly
Other manufacturers like Dell are doing the same thing nowadays. I think with the industry moving to more "optimized" and sleeker designs, this trend will continue to grow.
I sincerely appreciate your flexibility and willingness to give excellent information. I wanted to express my personal gratitude for the effort and extra time you have contributed. Thank you for your confidence and support. Thank You.
Thank you for your assessment. I bought a used 2015 MacBook Pro since all later models had faulty keyboards AND board mounted SSDs. I prefer to be able to upgrade SSDs and RAM myself and I am disgusted at the built in redundancy that Apple now implements in all their products.
@@xuansu9036 you are delusional if you think anyone more than an extremely narrow niche segment of people are actually upgrading ram on the 2012 - 2015 retina MBPs 🤣🤣🤣
If you want to use your dead MacBook as a shooting target, you have to place the MacBook 29.6 meters or 91.1 feet away so that the Apple logo has the exact optical size as the black circle os a standard shooting target.
Seen it mentioned in another video that the chip that's supposed to deliver iirc 2.5V to the SSD sometime goes screwy and ends up sending iirc 13V to the SSD which nukes it, burning out the NAND chips on the SSD
That'll be the 2V5 NAND VREG controller (there's a couple of others). Yes, on things like the A1990, A2141 the BGA chip VREGs are sitting on the outer edge of the logic board near the air vents and with no underfill or similar physical protective barriers; either this part, or there's a nearby cap, will over time get exposed to dust and moisture which starts a corrosion issue which in turn ultimately makes the VREG fail and you'll see often something higher than 2V5 going in to the NAND, or, if the cap nearby gets corroded enough it'll start a carbonising effect as the corrosion works it way through the logic board. 90% of the A1990 / A2141 machines repaired here are failing because of these physical corrosion failure issues.
@@AlibifortheAfterlife no, the M1/2 series actually did seem to learn lessons and they've mostly put their crucial VREG stuff under shields or away from such edges. Not to say there won't be othe new and exciting issues but the SSD VREG thing seems to have been a thing only for the A1990 / A2141 thus far
I manage a fleet of 100 PCs in my company and saw many broken HDDs but not even once had a damaged SSD. Some are up to 7 years old and Soldered NVM ssd's are not too uncommon here and we don't even buy very large drives. I never buy PCs with less than 16gb Ram to prevent excessive swapping. I dont' believe any regular user will ever reach the TBW of it's disk.... At least not before the battery has died and the external aspect of the case will make me buy another computer for this user. The over-voltage problem you mention is just the result of a terrible motherboard design by Apple and I smell a class action coming at them. Computers are not supposed to fry their SSD. It reminds me of the Nvidia chips problem on Mac Book Pros a few years ago, which to be honest was better handled by Apple in terms of after-sales support than by most PC manufacturers similarly affected by that same plague (those Nvidia chips were the culprits).
Maybe it depends on software that your users use. Personally I understood that something wrong with my 8GB M1 when started to use Adobe Lightroom (software that uses 70% of RAM at any system and has no slider to adjust it), and noticed, that it writes 10TB per day of usage due to swap. So right now I'm not using this software on my Mac anymore, and turned off swap completely (unfortunately, I don't know is it possible to activate OOM killer, so sometimes it freezes, when open too much apps).
I'm still using my 2015 2.8 ghz 16gb i7 because I can easily upgrade it myself. I never bothered with the T1's with SSD on the motherboard and nothing but USB-C ports because the extra speed meant nothing to me if I have to totally reconfigure all of my hardware and software and pay premium price for a tiny hard drive. Here's hoping that you can slap an NVME Port on to the motherboard of a 2021 or later 14" and 16" MBP in the near future. Those are the only MBP's that I've gotten excited about since 2015 because they have flexible ,sensible connectivity and MagSafe too!
After 2 times internal SSD got fried/die, I finally conclude to go for external nvme casing and booting from TB3 cable. All it was my random trial and error method. To me SMART was a jock. Surprised to see your video. Thanks for beautifully explained video. In other words I must say the video is the summary of my 2 years of struggle with my imac. Thanks for the video, Keep doing more. I have already subscribed to your channel. Thanks.
Swap does not work as you explained it. It usually moves to swap longer time not used memory pages (parts). Thus this pages are just written once in many cases and never used again. So the effect on ssd lifespan is small. But bigger RAM is always good to have.
Yes and no. It will page out pages that have low hit rate in ram. So if you are multi tasking and switching between applications when starved for ram, there will be a lot of swapping ... hence the name ... swap.
It may not be exaggerated as he explained, but it certainly play a very important role on fastening the wearing out speed. The TBW of one with 8G RAM is actually increased very much faster than those with 16G RAM when they have the same size of storage.
There's also a need to make a distinction between the types of SSDs used. Older MacBooks used MLC or TLC SSDs which are slower but generally will last longer than the new cheap consumer QLC SSDs
I use my MacBook Pro professionally for work from home job + iOS app development, I buy a new MacBook then run it for about 3 years under AppleCare and then sell it right before AppleCare runs out. This way I still get a lot of resell value from my device as well and the upgrade is about half the cost of a new MacBook and it never truly 'ages' to point of breaking completely.
I've had nothing but trouble with windows machines, OS randomly resetting, motherboard failures, PSU failures, I am getting really tired of people shitting on Apple when the alternative is just as or even more unreliable in the long term.
I can’t believe you showed me the things that you did. I had no idea that these problems exist. Thank you for putting this information out there. Thanks 🙏
Thank you very much for the detailed information. Even for 150 TBW, someone writing 50 GB every day, would need 3000 days to reach this. But just in case, I will be storing my large videos directly to an external disk.
The point is, if it runs out of RAM, it can actually swap a terabyte onto the SSD in a day. Imagine if it writes just 200 MB per second, it can reach 1TB in less than two hours of usage.
@Tanya Spotting how many total byte written you got now, I just bought a second hand MacBook air m1 that have 210 TB byte written already. And i saw that most of 256 gb ssd only have lifecycle of 150 TBW. So what should i do? What is the write cycle of the mac m1 air 256?
I have old laptop, in which I have same ssd from 2016. And I know in one day It will die, but I don't keep important stuff permanently in one place. Once I had mechanical drive fail on me, I nearly lost years worth work on that. So backing up is a mandatory thing for me. There is so many reasons not to use Mac's, but people are still buying them.
Nice video. My office issued M1 MacBook Pro has 64 GB RAM and 1TB SSD, so it's most likely going to outlast its useful life. My M2 MacBook Pro has 16GB RAM and 512 GB SSD. I don't run too much heavy stuff on it, so I haven't noticed it swapping. But it's shocking how much memory apps use these days. The UA-cam browser tab displaying this video is currently taking 0.6GB! So, it's easy for the usage to quickly add up if you have lots of stuff open. I also have a 2014 Mac mini with a (replaceable) SSD that's going strong - used primarily as a media server, so it hardly does much writes. BTW, Random Access Memory doesn't mean what you say - "data is randomly moving in and out". Here, random simply means you can access data (read or write) in approximately the same time, regardless of which location it is stored at. Contrast this with a Hard Disk or even tape where certain locations take longer to access than others.
I am kind of glad that I chose my M1 Pro MacBook Pro with 16 GB of unified RAM and 1 TB storage. I use Logic Pro and should really put its data onto an external drive, but, then again, this limits its portability. Hmm… I used a 2012 MacBook Air with 128 GB of storage and 4 GB of RAM for 9 years, incl. Garage Band and Logic Pro projects. My SSD died once, but not really. A computer repair service soldered it, and I didn't even loose any data; and the Mac worked fine after the fix until I sold it to a friend as a beginner MacBook. As far as I know it is still working fine, haven't heard anything different. Thanks for the great explanatory video. Keep up the good work! :)
Good video, but still.. instead of encouraging people to just live with the problem and learn to deal with it, I’d suggest to not buy any apple product that has a soldered SSD. I just bought my 2nd Mac mini from 2012 where it was still possible to swap ram and HHD/SSD and even go dual SSD. And upgraded it to its max. I could have easily bought the newest one, but I’m not supporting that sh*t. I think the only real solution to this problem, is to boycott Apple products that are not meant to be upgraded. They love to talk about saving the environment, using recycled materials and reinvent packaging, but everything they do is just to make more money!! Does no one see that?
SSDs are a gold mine for apple strategically. It makes me shudder when I'm reminded that they're soldered on. For anyone that's ever attempted data recovery, it's always harder to recover a corrupted SSD. HDDs give you indicators that something is going wrong and you have multiple avenues to attempt recovery but an SSD is ridiculously more difficult to recover data from successfully. I was replacing the HDD on an old laptop that was pretty slow with HDD issues popping up and after cloning the drive it ran almost like new. My friend around the same time sent me their SSD to see if I could fix it because it was glitching and intermittently experiencing slowdowns. While I could access the drive, certain files would trigger intense slowdowns if I interacted with them. I had an SD card behave the same way before and knew it was corrupted. While a partially corrupted HDD can be cloned, SSDs refuse to even engage wih any cloning software or hardware. I only use an SSD in my laptop because Windows 10 doesn't run well on HDDs because they skipped optimizing their file system because they didn't think they needed to anymore with faster SSD speeds. I only bought that laptop because it had a secondary HDD that I could offload the heavy file manipulation to. While SSDs have a finite number of writes before burning out, HDDs are only limited by their moving parts wearing down. They actually run longer, the less you cycle them on and off. We're making it so much more expensive for the average person to recover from a solar flare...
I’ve always been a firm believer in HDD’s for longevity. SSD’s may be faster but they seem far less durable. As you said HDD’s theoretically have an unlimited amount of write cycles whereas SSD’s have an absolute finite lifespan. I have 25 year old HDD’s that still work fine. They also mostly start to fail slowly whereas SSD’s often die rapidly with very little hope of recovery.
Excellent!! I did do well getting the M1 Max with 64 RAM and 2TB storage, still performing great and 99% SSD lifespan available. The question is, once SSD dies can be replaced by another??
Straight after having finished installing and configuring my Mac Studio Max (standard model with 32GB ram and 512GB storage) I moved my user profile to a TB3 NVMe enclosure with a 2TB Seagate Firecuda 530 in it. That leaves the precious internal storage for te OS and Applications. True that the internal storage is faster, but you won’t notice a difference in real life. So when I copy a file to my desktop it is actually on the external storage, this goes for all user profile related data like Pictures, Documents and Download folders.
@@UserUser-ww2njsomething that's worth noticing is that iPhones that came with 64gb of on board storage are dying because of the nand flash reaching its end of life. On my part, I don't have this issue, all my android phones have micro SD card slot and as Louis Rossman stated before, iPhone design is highly flawed which happens to be true . As someone who uses android, I will never own phones like galaxy s23 ultra, the S20 ultra, s9 , these ones are worth keeping
@@danteerskine7678 I had noticed in quite a few videos that there was a problem with the Nand , coincidence or planned i wonder . Very easy for them to put on a little chip with a countdown timer and set it to fail a component . I have Andoid as well and would never have an Iphone . My current phones are Oneplus 5t and OneplusNord . . The 5t is getting on a bit but still works flawlessly , the Nord is my backup phone , a bit essential where I am . Also a Samsung s8 but thats a long story 😂 . None of mine have an SD card slot but the 5t has 124gb so more than enough
I always back-up my data on a old school harddrive. I never experienced problems doing that, it's slow…, but I only put data on that HD drive that I barely use. I hate Apple for soldering SSD's. And Apple cares about the environment. 😂😂😂 I call that greenwashing!
i always never buy the touch bar versions as you can replace the ssd on a non touch bar but not the touchbar version or at least you can in a 2017 macbook pro
Thank you very much. This information is priceless. My wallet, my Mac, and myself, will benefit greatly from this information in my daily Mac usage going forward.
I contemplated whether I needed the 64GB RAM version and now I’m glad I chose that option. I have seen spikes exceeding 32GB of RAM (by a tiny bit). Thanks for this valuable info!
Get 32GB RAM if most of the time your biggest projects and all the other apps that you use simultaneously are below 28GB RAM. In a few months with new updates you're going to have more RAM usage. But generally 99% of all people don't need more than 32GB RAM, and I personally would not count on "investing for the future" in terms of RAM on Crapbooks because of crApple's famously non-existent reliability and for their products bricking themselves after just 3-4 years compared to the likes of Asus laptops that can easily work for more than 10 years if they are maintained well (repasted on time - I would recommend everyone use PTM7950 to repaste the CPU and GPU, it's fantastic, it's better than all thermal pastes and it's going to serve forever and it will basically never dry out compared to a thermal paste or liquid metal (incorrect application of which would require you to reapply after a year if it wasn't enough, or will absolutely destroy your entire CPU/GPU and motherboard and make you broke if you apply too much and if just one little droplet makes its way out of the CPU die))
@@one_step_sideways that is good RAM advice. Sky’s the limit if your use case requires (I have 128GB on my desktop Lolol) but yeah 32gb for a laptop is generally sufficient for most. I cringe that 8 and 16 are still relatively common configurations…
Great video. Definitely informative and easy to comprehend. My previous MacBook Pro, 2011, still kicking, anything new should give u that life span or more, I think!
on my old m1 MacBook Air I had the swap memory usage, I got the base model back in 2020 and I was using around 2-5gb of swap when using Final Cut and Xcode, but now I got ht else model M2 MacBook Air 15 inch with the upgraded 10-core GPU and I disabled swap memory so it never uses it plus editing all my files off iCloud or my 2tb Samsung t5 drive. On the old one I had in 3 months 19TB out of 150TBW but now after 1 month of use I have only 500gb out of 150TBW. The performance is the same even when editing 4K on Final Cut and it works butter smooth.
It is easy to see TBW your SSD already used with software. For Windows I use Open Hardware monitor. I put the SSD in the computer 2 years ago. It has 12TBW. So it's using 6TBW a year. It's a 500gb Samsung 860 evo drive. It claims at least 180TBW, so it could last up to thirty years :) So no worries about TBW :)
Yes when I was looking for my new laptop the removable SSD was one of the main points to have. Only issue I had with my Asus Zephyrus G14 was garbage wi-fi card, which I was also able to swap with good intel card.
This is one of the best video I have ever watched related to macbook devices, its true a crazy life, Louis Rossman said the same, and he suggested even old 2012 mac and not those latest devices having soldered SSD. true crazy life
I'm not entirely afraid that my SSD will fail due to too much data being written to it. I've got a 1TB Samsung 970 Evo as my PC's system drive, had it for about two years and even with HEAVY use I have only written 15TB to it. Considering I use my MacBook in instances when I work remotely and offload pretty much all tasks to an external NVMe SSD, I think it's more likely some IC is gonna fry long before I write 150TB to my laptop's SSD.
I feel the same about my 2016 small 12 rMB. Only thing is I get feeling that new Macbooks blast the NVMe with 12 volts without having to use up all your TWB.
I’ve got an 1TB M1 MacBook Air running Sonoma with 5 Safari tabs open, Finder, Messages, Mail, Maps, Photos, Calendar, Notes, Music, Numbers, Calculator, System Settings, System information and Activity Monitor open and it’s not using swap memory. Memory used is 6.72GB of 8GB.
What a fantastic video! Great content and many many thanks for explaining it like the way it should be! Cant wait for the remaining parts. Not to mention the humour! Haha! Subscribed!
Most People will not be able even reach any were near 150TBW on 128GB drive or 300TBW on 256GB drive even. For a 128GB drive with 150TBW you need to write 82GB data daily to reach 150TBW limit in 5 years. So 99.9% consumers will never reach the rated lifespan even majority of PRO will not be able to reach it unless it is a server doing data warehousing or chia mining 24X7.
@@Teluric2then I see the MacBook as a “suffering from success”: It’s powerful, portable and convenient, but the SSD can’t handle too much abuse. Better use a desktop for this stuff anyway
Superb video! Your clear and concise explanation of TBW cycles is invaluable in helping to make an informed purchase of a new (or recent) device, and how to mitigate the inevitable entropy of SSDs leveraging M2 or other external storage for large files. Also, major bonus points for the humor!
Excellent video! I think it's the best informative video I've ever watched. You deserve an award. The narration and graphics are the seller. You made it easy to understand a sophisticated (or at least the least explained) topic. You're a good teacher. You are an excellent content producer. Thank you for making this video and helping people understand this important topic.
TBW is actually to do with physics. Basically the NAND circuit in the SSD chip can only be cycled a limited number of times. The TBW grows with disk size as bigger disks reserve more 'spare' nand cells to use when some go bad. Simple free way to check your TBW is open a terminal window and type the command iostat -Id disk0 (that is a capital I and lowercase d) The last number is the number of bytes written since new. Divide by 1000000 to get TBW (actually 1048576 but a million is close enough)
I've seen in another vid that sometimes it's down to the chip that supposed to send the correct voltage to the SSD going screwy and sending too much voltage to the SSD, burning out the NAND chips
Every electronic piece is disposable... Don't forget about our 2010' window laptops who were dying after 2 years, no matter what you did with it Just us things while considering as they are; do frequent saves etc
You guys are awesome! Everytime you upload I learn something new. This time, THANK GOD I did not buy a new MBP. Lol. Still have a 2012 (pre retina) going strong. You know, from the era apple products were not suck..
@@sebastianturley4372 Dont want to sound rude, but my work MacBook 16" M1 Max chip 2021 32GB 1TB is the best ever so far... Again you are living in the past.
One thing though, when you delete a file, the file isn’t erased. Only he entry for the file is deleted, the file stays, and that saves TONS of writing to the ssd!
I hate soldered SSDs, the thought of it just dying 😡 and if that wasn’t bad enough they have a data retention issue too 😩 some say the data will just fade away after about 10 years if not rewritten so I guess a lot of Nintendo Wiis will start dying soon ohh and Apple Silicon Macs keep their firmware on their SSD so if it breaks the Mac can no longer do anything like booting from an external system drive!
I think you missed one important point for the SSDs (not only for the soldered ones in the Macbooks), if you erase a file on the SSD, you will also loose parts of your TBW, as the the cells are cleared what is also a writing process, that makes all even worse, you can try to use more provision to have more spare-cells, what can expand the lifespan of the SSD, but i don't know if this works at the fruit computers. Also very important the more states a cell has the worse the endurance SLC, TLC, QLC. My conclusion: avoid like a plague soldered SSDs, avoid like another plague proprietary formats of SSDs. ONLY standard connectors (Sata, msata, m2)
I think you got this wrong. Deleting a file does not write over the data blocks. No OS does that, you need special software to do that. Deleting a file only adds the blocks to the free blocks list and removes the entry in the folder.
@@robertbrzheintzbrz147 But before writing new data to the cells they are erased e.g cell having a value 55 is then set to 00 and then rewritten with FF as far as i have heard. I'm not specialist in that things, but i think especially the need for swapping due to insufficient space is a bigger issue than most users think. Its not like with the hdds where the old data were simply overwritten.
Awesome presentation Dude. I've been sitting on the fence with a load of info on Macbooks M2 models . This has put me on the ground . My 2011 has battled on this far and now deciding on windows world where that shit loads up temp files on your SSD
Amazing job! you have a new sub. Just to say in relation to 12:24 : I've a 16GB of ram Macbook Air M1 and it uses swap memory even with a lot of ram available. I think this is just the way macOS works
@@Teluric2 This is not a fault. MacOS uses it even when is RAM available because the operating system may decide to use swap space to temporarily store data that it anticipates it will need again in the near future, so that it can free up physical RAM for other things, this helps the overall performance and Windows/Linux do domething similar The fault is the SSD Lifespan
@@alex.x8782 If the ssd was replaceable it wouldn't have been an issue and this is why some people see mac users as sheeple. Every other laptop brand can have their memory, hard drive and sometimes even the processor replaced by the user and it's not even a hard thing to do since most laptops just have a removable cover which exposes these parts.
If you watch a lot of UA-cam videos, the videos also get written to your SSD as it's buffered. I have no idea about other sites, but I do know for a fact UA-cam does it.
This video was awesome, I am aware of all this stuff already but I’ve never seen a video this good explaining it to the average person. I will definitely refer people to this video when they ask me what they should get. Bravo!
If someone make a replacement mainboard with removable nvme drive and ram using the MBP mainboard form factor to serve as a drop in replacement, they can be very rich.
What nonsense... "150TBW" does NOT mean it will die once you reached those "limits". Just like a car is not magically stop running just because you reached the 50.000 miles your car seller gives you guarantee for. It's the MINIMUM the manufacturer guarantees until it MAY stop working. But in reality, the limit is much much higher than that. There are even a lot of tools to get to know how much life span your SSD as left and how hard you're able to hit it. On my 512GB MacBook Air for example, I would have to write over 140GB to the SSD Every. Single. Day. To reach the probably maximum life span after over 9 years(!!!). 9 years of constant 140GB/day.
No, SSDs do exactly "magically stop running" and there's little you can fo when it happens. And the moment when it happens is absolutely unpredictable.
I have a 2014 iMac, and a 2017 MacBook Pro. I use them constantly for my job. I’m a web developer. I’ve never had any of the problems mentioned in this video. Just saying.
@@MichaelThomasDevjust because YOU haven't, doesn't mean others haven't. I use s 2015 MBA daily which I can replace the SSD, but I haven't had to. If it does die one day, it's replaceable, unlike newer macTrash and I can keep using my Mac while others need an entirely new computer.
A lot of companies have special engineers that work on how to limit the lifespan of the device. They have two methods: hardware and software. Hardware is with the limited TBW in combination with soldering it on the mothermotherboard, and with the voltage thing zapping it. Then they got limited OS updates. Older devices can the new mac OS just fine, but they fase them out so you can not download any new programs from the macstore because it will not run on the older OS. There are workarounds for this but it is kind of tedious to get Sanoma on older devices. But once you get it done what you see is: the performance is great, zero issues. So they are throttling it on purpose to a max version of OS. It is a choice. Good thing i bought the maxed out version, i never knew the smallest ram and ssd will do 4 times as fast as the bigger ones. Great tips also, thanks.
All those UA-cam Apple Gurus promoting buying the base level MacBooks because they are a much better deal than maxed out models. Turns out they were dishing wrong advice. Unless you’re the type to buy a MacBook every 2 years…
Great video! I suspected that an external drive would help me preserve the internal SSD of my MacBook air better. Now my suspection is confirmed. Also, when I was looking for my first Mac, I bought the one with a 512GB SSD rather than the 256GB one but I wasn't mindful about how that related to the lifespan of it. So I ended up getting some extra lifespan too. Definitely we who aren't the rich folks who love Apple products must be really careful not to deplete the equipment too soon. Thanks so much for the info!
Buy only old mac with upgradeable ram and ssd. But of course those old macs have already been "orphaned" by Apple. so you need to run windows on old macs.
Yes, I was around when Apple started and revered macintoshes in the 90s. But I’m pissed at them for the crap they’ve neglected for us customers in the last 15 years
I heard that the bigger the SSD is the longer life it might get, as the same cells will be used less frequently reducing the wear. That being said, having 256GB and only keeping 10-20% free over a long period might kill it faster. However, I have an old mid-2014 MacBook Pro with 512 GB SSD where about 80% of the space was constantly taken and the SSD is still alive. That MacBook was used 18 hours per day 6 days a week over all the years till this moment so only the battery was replaced around 5 or 6 times. At the same time, my wife's SSD in a mid-2015 Mac Book Pro died under much more friendly conditions.
This is a good reason to shut off the PC when not in use. All activity f Read /Write is halted which includes virus scanning, page swapping, background tasks etc. Secondly, eliminate read writes with software such as Diskeeper aka Dynamic I/O. In 3 years, I've saved 24 full days of read writes to the hard drive. This TBW stuff has me reducing my image backups now.
It would be so easy to make these the same NAND chips that are replaceable in the mac studio, but Apple doesn't want long lasting devices anymore since they can just sell you next year's upgrade
At 14:37 the lifetime percentage reported by the ssd usually is the percentage of backup blocks left. So technically speaking if everything is in check with the SSD it should work properly until 0% lifetime. Also the TBW is just the "guarantee" a manufacturer gives to its product to show the quality of it. An SSD can last much longer or shorter than that. It should be taken as "it will fail around that value" and not a "it will die the moment it reaches that value"
Fantastic advice. Appreciate your take on this. It's not cheapskate to want your expensive, valuable Macbook to last much longer. The concept of swappable SSD storage on laptops is critical and when Apple chose to solder an expendable part, they doomed it for eventual failure regardless of people using it as intended. My laptop had one SSD failure after just 20 months, but the second one lasted more than 5 years. Now it's failing again. It's too bad Apple doesn't abandon this bad practice.
I have learn a lot about Mac ssd. Thanks a lot. I’m using a 2017 Mbp with a 256gb ssd. 27TB data units written. I will change the thermal paste and the battery and for sure stop copy a lot of data in this Mac. Thanks again dude ❤
The other thing as to why you get a larger SSD than you think you need is an issue with wear levelling. The TBW metric is oversimplified. The SSD has a number of blocks (say 1000 for a simple example), each of which can be rewritten 1000 times. What happens if the SSD keeps rewriting the same block rather than sharing the load? If your SSD is 80% full, then all that writing and rewriting is spread over the 20% of blocks remaining, which means that those blocks get worn out way quicker than the TBW lifespan metric would indicate.
I'm writing this on a refurb Thinkpad I got off eBay for £150, which has an nvme slot. It's current SSD is small (250GB) and is about 60% full with all my music and other software installed. But as and when that becomes an issue, it is an M.2 SSD, so I can replace it. The RAM is 4GB fixed plus one slot (currenty 4GB but I can stick a 16GB stick in at some point).
I can understand fixing the memory to the CPU (better speed/latency). Having two tiers of memory (fast RAM on the CPU and secondary RAM in slots on the motherboard) would complicate things.
But soldered storage is a cardinal sin. I have a friend who is mac only. Her current Mac has served her well for 10 years. A new mac will cost a lot, and this video points out what I'm very concerned about, namely that she won't get 10 years out of a new mac. 5 if she's lucky. So the cost is amortised over half the time, so is effectively twice the price per-year compared to her current mac.
More and more Macs are becoming a means for Apple to rinse the rich, and to hell with everybody else.
TBW is per entire drive capacity, before failure. So divide that with the number of TB of the drive and then convert to GB. You then get how many TB a single GB of free space on your SSD can be overwritten with before that GB dies.
Maybe SSD companies have clever tech that randomly rearranges the stored data to different datablocks to prevent the issue your saying... doesn't seem that absurd of an idea hahaha
The other thing not mentioned is deleting files are also write operations, which tally to TBW as well
Give her your thinkpad
God you are dramatic. It really isn’t that bad. Oh NOOO she didn’t get *10 years* out of a laptop computer? THE HORROR 😂😂 TF you smoking!?!
Louis Rossman also covered this issue with the failed texas intruments component failure. Its absolutely shameful how apple designed the logic board with no abily to protect the ssd from being destroyed
shameful? it is CRIMINAL! they do it on purpose
It would be pretty easy to clamp that converter output to ground if the voltage output exceeds a certain level, to protect the SSDs. The converter chip is probably being used too close to its rated limit, leading to eventual premature failure. The SSDs themselves should be mounted on a socketed sub-PCB to facilitate their eventual replacement and/or upgrade, if needed. To do otherwise is just greed forced into bad design practice for higher profit, from overpricing the value of these commodity SSD chips, as installed.
And guess what , this video states the ssd is replaceable but sadly it is not as the bios and firmware is also loaded from some sections of the drive hence the reason why it doesn't even post to screen with the dead ssd , older models you could at least see some picture even with a dead ssd, even louis Rossman covered it and said the ssd was non replaceable....I currently have a 16 inch 2019 with this same issue , after diagnosis, I discovered all ssd chips are shorted to ground (even after removing the Texas chipset)
This is intentional designed obsolescence, it makes certain you will have to buy a new "product" down the road.
Shameful because the pros are really good
As an Apple Certified Technician you nailed this topic very well and very informative, but…
1) You made the swapping issue more dramatic and dynamic than it usually is. Yes, swapping is bad, but it's not as constant and dynamic, meaning that the "200MB" swap file is not constantly being written back and forth, it's the amount of swap being used. And Swap memory is not and does not act like Random Access Memory, that is wrong, it's a temporary inactive "cache" part of the used memory stored for later use and to give space back for immediate needs.
2) You left out an important issue about SSD space and longevity, filling up the drive and keeping it that way as your main and only storage is bad, very bad, as there is little room for the OS (and you) to perform common tasks and for the SSD controller to execute wear leveling. Leading to a premature wear of cells.
3) The type of NAND flash (MLC, TLC, QLC) chips have a huge impact and it's not simple or short to explain here, a good excuse to investigate and make another educational video. In short, avoid QLC based SSDs. Apple uses TLC from all the manufacturers that supply the chips, fortunately.
4) TBW is not an "end of life" point, but an average MTBF (meantime between failure) measurement and the majority of drives can exceed this "lifespan" metric many times. Your example proves it as the drive had 80% life left after doubling its TBW.
In theory and statically in practice (not counting manufacturing defects) the life of the SSD in soldered MacBooks will out pass the lifespan of the machine by the average user ownership period of 4-5 years for an 8GB SSD. But if the TBW is higher, better (a larger drive will always be recommended as you mentioned in the video, double that if you add more RAM, but of course this is expensive when it comes to Apple's pricing scheme).
Good video!
Amazing comment, thank you for taking the time to inform us.
This dude @creamwobbly seems real confident about this. Anyone else have an opinion on swap vs cache? My Macbook is on the line!! haha
Can you help me understand when the Mac says that x amount of MB is being used in the swap? Is that.. like 200mb/second? .. like always adding 200mb? Or just 200mb... sitting there not changing.. until the figure does change? So if that number stays the same for 4 hours and I close the computer for the day.. the total MB written to the drive for the day will have been 200mb? But what if at hour 2 it drops to 100mb? Is the total then 300 for the day? 100? spitting the difference at 150?
Swap memory is actually used as real RAM. The OS certainly tries hard to move the inactive parts of the memory to swap while keeping frequently used parts on physical RAM, but it doesn't succeed every time in prioritising those data.
@@mootsym Commonly the less swap the better. Some people have a 10GB swap file on their M1 Macbooks with 8GB RAM, though not enough time has passed for those M1 Macbooks to start dying from SSD failure en masse. It's certainly not 10GB/second. But swap storage acts any way it pleases and it usually writes more randomly than not, meaning that if MacOS wants to write some data from the RAM to the swap file, it certainly would, without really discerning what data it is.
Apple made a conscious decision to _specifically_ use swap storage as if it's extra RAM. No one else does that in the same scope as how Apple does it. They knew what they were doing, and what they were doing is screwing their customers over.
This is the best way that I've seen the SSD problem explained. Everyone must buy an external SSD and use the internal one as little as possible. Thank you.
I've subscribed on the strength of the vital information that you've provided so eloquently.
the best things to do is to stop buying their products and see what they do to get you back!
They do not care because there is a lot of people who will by it anyways
Wow apparently the sky is falling…
That’s easy to say for someone who doesn’t rely on their software
Gonna need right to repair. Or some massive class action type hardware failure that finally wakes people up. Still using a 2011 and feel forced to look back to pc after all these years. Definitely a shame.
You’ve never purchased an apple product before. Stop giving advice
Even my first MacBook from 2011 is still running like a charm 😅 But I admit it was a better time when you could simply replace the ssd and ram ❤
anything is replaceable, its just not plug n play
Ok then let's say times where better where you had a easier time replacing the ssd and ram 😅🙈
Man I love my 2011 MacBook!
I'm going to boot up my 2011 mac book today! Thanks for the reminder. I can probably max out ram to 32GB now fairly cheaply....
@@bobbiejoe4726 16 prob but I don't think they support 32.
Tip:
buy the lowest possible storage option;
use it till warranty expires;
find a third-party that does ssd chip upgrade.
Tons of money saved.
don't use apple crap, tons of money saved
@@vladduh3164buy a cheap Windows laptop. That are slow and just be slower over time. Plastic shit that be broken just because you lift it in the screen ? Or an android phone that are made of glass and crack if you lose it. I don’t know how many android I have tried before I move to iPhone. Or how many times I have delete all on my windows pc and install windows again because it’s to slow to use. Or how many windows laptops I have broken because it hit the floor or lift it up in the screen and the screen it’s broken. I have a 10 year old iPad that’s still works. And my 11 year old MacBook that I have trow around a lot and now it’s time for and MacBook Air. Tell me one tablet that’s still works after 10 year or a window laptop that’s not made of cheap plastic with long battery time. Yes Apple products are expensive but the are have good build quality. Try it and you will understand
Buy a repairable and upgradable PC - and save tons of money.
@@kennethvalbjoernmy last 24 months with my pc. 2 high end asus mobos dead and rma’d but asus being asus overcharged me for the first one and lost my second one and blamed me for it. Msi 4090 melted cable and also took my seasonic 1000watt psu with it. Where is the money I saved?
@@spamspasm8183 you got unlucky, most PCs don’t have hardware issues, the main issue lies with windows 10 software being a pain to use
I think upcoming EU rules will oblige manufacturers like Apple to make easy repairable products in order to combat e-waste and restore consumer rights. So that would mean replaceable SSDs and batteries for laptops. These manufacturers (like Apple) will do this only when they have to in order to comply to the law (like using USB-C ports).
1000% agreed
LOL. EU are just talkers and no doers.
@@danilodistefanis5990very true. Europeans will still buy iPhones, even though it doesn't have USB c
@@danilodistefanis5990so the new iphone doesn't have a usb-c port😛
@brianj6314 it does where I live, macbooks too
This is an amazing breakdown. To all my mac mini family, i'm using a dock with an external SSD. I am not saving anything on my internal SSD. All downloads go directly to my SSD within the dock. Glad I found this video early.
Just got a Mac studio last week and I am doing the same.
@@notsure1135 Good call bro. Internal SSD is only for apps. Should last us a while. They are starting to do Soldered SSd swaps, so we just have to survive until it gets mainstream. Apple is annoying but these M2 computers are the best i have ever seen, literately no lag.
@@bruxolabs-thedefitribunal I got the M1 Max studio with 512GB and you can swap those out if same size which is fkn handy. I am gonna source a few of those in the next year for the inevitable burnout of the ssd.
Hope I get some life out of this setup.
@@notsure1135 nice bro. I was watching a video by another youtuber who was breaking down the math of failure. If you go the external SSD route, it should last you a really long time because you will not be swapping a lot, and the data storage on the internal will be distributed more widely. Happy we found this out now, rather than later.
It will make no difference. The SSD where the OS is installed is where the swapping takes place. Saving downloaded files to the external drive will have minimal impact - it's the swapping that is responsible for 99% of writes.
The best explanation of how an SDD works, why they fail, and what you can do to prolong their life that I have found. Thank you, thank you, thank you. I will now be making changes to both my iMac and PC setups to prolong the life of the SSDs that I have in both systems.
Nice video!
At 13:09 RAM means Random Access Memory.
Random means that you can read or write any (random) location in the memory with the same access time.
Compare this to Sequential Memory like a tape drive where you have to wind the tape to the correct position to access the data.
I have 2 older MacBooks, a 2012 and 2009. Both are running Linux Mint 21.1 , both have maxed RAM and both have 1TB SATA SSDs. They run and look great. I also have a fully repairable/upgradable i7 Framework laptop 64GB RAM, 2TB SSD also running Mint. Finally, I have a 2020 M1 MacBook Air 256gb which will be my last. It will be Framework & Linux from now on. My iPhone 12 will be my last iPhone too.
Looks like someone gotta quite the 🍏 ecosystem here
So you make an argument based on 2 macs. Of course you ll find many people that wont die of lung cancer with heavy smoking
How did u make the trackpad work with linux? I tried a few years ago and I couldn't I have a MacBook Pro 2012
I wont buy mac any more, after speding 3800£ for m1max 64gb ram, the computer is slow, and wont work as should, over the year of useage, and battery is decreese to 89% joke
@@rousedvideo3380well that's a you problem
It's absolutely criminal to have soldered SSDs. It's like having non removable tyres on a car.
Worse, non removable engine critical components....
If the car makers thought they could get away with it, they would.
Don’t give them ideas!
Tell that to apple bros...
You're absolutely right. As a person with fairly good computer knowledge I knew about this problem even before I watched your video and commented this sad fact on nearly every LTT video about Macs I watched. I did however underestimate how many died that early because of the SSD reaching its maximum write cycles. It's damn infuriating and shocking. Thanks for helping to quantify the extent of the problem !
How many died? I missed that. Nobody is projecting any estimate of failure in this video. Just speculation
@@rcpmaca lot! any MacBook or MacBook pro with on board ssd over 5 years old is likely to die as customers buy them for ram heavy apps like video editing, graphic design, music production, any where user stored data to near maximum for extended period of time, that would include buying used logic boards to repair a dead Mac. Yeah don't know how many. You maybe right no one keeping count. Yet it's a lot, and eventually maybe all... that is shocking.
@@brucemercury Your SSD is not RAM. RAM is volatile storage only used to store the state of programs currently running and clears itself as soon the computer is powered down. RAM doesn't have the limited write/erase cycles like an SSD. SSDs are persistent storage that stores long term and even when your computer is turned off.
@@brando4526 yeah and where do you think the Mac will write to when RAM is no longer enough? to /var/vm/swapfile* from 1GB to nGB of RAM help written to the SSD.
@@danilodistefanis5990 Yes, I am aware that SSD is used when RAM is filled up. But that's not something you want to do all the time because it can wear out your SSD faster and SSD is not as fast as RAM. RAM and SSD are two very different kinds of memory.
Hello, first of all it is a unique content. You explained very useful things. But a TBW lifespan doesn’t mean that SSD is going to die. It means that the manufacturer will no longer give guarantee to SSD. There is a lot of working SSDs which has already completed their TBW lifespan years ago. It is more about the breakdown of the storage cells in SSD. In normal conditions, most probably a user can use the SSD for couple more years after completing the TBW lifespan. It was a great content thanks to you.
Youre right! When we uploaded this video, we already clarified some facts regarding the TBW to this video description, of what the actual scenario when the TBW limit's reached. and what you're saying is completely true, as its not always die 100%, but since we've had some SSDs behave erratically when TBW limit's reached on these Macs, so we'd like to call it dead.
And as a logic board technician's perspective, when we repair MacBooks with dead SSD issue, ETHICALLY we will never install bad TBW SSDs to your client's Mac. (because in the next video, we will explain most of the SSDs need to pulled off from another working Mac - and we don't even have any choice!)
and thanks for watching! :)
Still doesn't matter, ssd's also fail before their TBW is reached, and being soldered on, creates the same problem, a useless laptop that CAN'T be fixed
@@michaelkeudel8770I have seen some videos here with people replacing/upgrading the SSDs of M1 MacBooks but it needs advanced technical skills, soldering stations and connection to another Mac to start the MacBook M1 in DFU mode and install macOS.
@@TechAndGuides it needs advanced skills and expensive tools, and an incredibly steady hand, there's no reason a socket can't be there instead. The likely hood of success is very small because the way it's designed. Your storage should NEVER be the deciding factor of when it's time to upgrade YOUR ENTIRE computer.
Is the DFU in ROM?
I don't know if it's intentional or not, but you make the SSD usage ware case sound quite more scary than it actually is. My first ever SSD (a 256GB Samsung 840 PRO) is being used in a PC that almost never shuts down for almost 10 years now. It has 74000 hours of operation, and 58 TBW used, with typical user usage. I don't know if such an old model has 300TBW limit or not, but even if it has 150 TBW (as if it was a modern 128GB SSD) this would mean that it has more or less another 15 years of life in it. It will be 25 years old if it ever reaches to that point! I have had mechanical disks that failed quite sooner than the 10 years mark!
The only real issue with Apple is that SSD's are soldered on the board, and it's not easy to replace/upgrade them. That's more of a concern if the SSD goes faulty, rather than if it wears out due to usage and reach it's expected TBW after (most likely) 15 or 20 years.. Especially since Apple declares most of it's products obsolete after 7-8 years of their release (and unfortunately Microsoft copied with it's Windows 11 upgrade policy).
IMHO a typical user should just enjoy the ease and convenience SSD's offer, and not live in a constant fear that he may have written a few GB more today on his SSD, or that the movie he downloaded damaged his disc. And finally IMHO unless you need HUGE storage space, external discs belong in the past and should stay there.
Granted, USB C protocol is very fast, but external discs are bulky and messy. If my internal disc can fit all the data I need and leave at least 25%-30% of the drive empty, why should I bother to carry around spare discs, remember to connect them, then remember to not move my MAC while the discs are connected (or to not use it on my lap) then remember to eject them, and finally disconnect them? Supposedly MACs are famous for the ease of their usage and the total user experience they offer, no ?
PS: I have both a 2021 MBP and a 2021 Asus ROG laptop. The Asus came with 1TB SSD on board. Not only this SSD can be replaced/upgraded, but it also offers a second M.2 slot. So now the Asus has it's original SSD and a second 2TB Samsung 980 M.2 PRO. And the coolest thing is that I didn't had to send it away for the upgrade, nor become an expert to desoldering/soldering components. I just unscrewed 6 screws, put the disc in, screwed the screws back and I was done in less than 5 minutes! Aaaah... Apple! :P
@Josshyua exactly this - already 230 TBW with my 2021 M1 MacBook Air 16GB - Just got an external 4TB SSD to boot from now on
@@Ph1lW0so crazy. Macos is killing them
this is what holding me from purchasing macs these days...it really happened
Thanks for the reminder. I just checked my swap file and it was 11GB, despite having 32GB of RAM. Gotta shut things down when I finish, or finish projects more quickly
Other manufacturers like Dell are doing the same thing nowadays. I think with the industry moving to more "optimized" and sleeker designs, this trend will continue to grow.
Nah, the industry is moving on the "apple" way that means: "broken or not working device? Replace it! "
But dell dont make promises of superior hardware.
Not for all niches
Alienware is a nonsense, they offer laptops with 12700 and 3070, but with SOLDERED 8GB of ddr5 ram... Non upgradable.
@@Teluric2 Well certainly it would be a false promise from Dell if they did...
I sincerely appreciate your flexibility and willingness to give excellent information. I wanted to express my personal gratitude for the effort and extra time you have contributed. Thank you for your confidence and support. Thank You.
Glad it was helpful! Thanks for watching! :)
he earn money on apple logo.
@@nnnnnn3647you defend apple without being payed 😢
Just had a 2.5 Samsung SSD die from only 3 years of VERY LITTLE USE. Couldn’t believe it.
Thank you for your assessment. I bought a used 2015 MacBook Pro since all later models had faulty keyboards AND board mounted SSDs. I prefer to be able to upgrade SSDs and RAM myself and I am disgusted at the built in redundancy that Apple now implements in all their products.
Apple: Your security is very important to us, I mean you.
Oh wow, jokes on you then!, you got a computer with soldered on RAM
@@spacecadet2172 but could still be replaced and upgraded by a professional repairer. Not as easy as a sodimm, but doable.
@@xuansu9036 you are delusional if you think anyone more than an extremely narrow niche segment of people are actually upgrading ram on the 2012 - 2015 retina MBPs 🤣🤣🤣
@@spacecadet2172 do you know the meaning of the word "irrelevant"?
This issue applies to all SSD’s, it’s not an Apple specific problem. Great explanation
The Apple specific problem is you can’t replace it
So your whole PC gets bricked
But you can replace the ssd in other PC for about 50$
Thank you, I never knew this about my M1 MacBook Pro. The animated explosions we’re also hilarious, along with your very humorous delivery style!
If you want to use your dead MacBook as a shooting target, you have to place the MacBook 29.6 meters or 91.1 feet away so that the Apple logo has the exact optical size as the black circle os a standard shooting target.
Wow my 2012 Mac mini with SSD cached fusion drive still working well today.
Seen it mentioned in another video that the chip that's supposed to deliver iirc 2.5V to the SSD sometime goes screwy and ends up sending iirc 13V to the SSD which nukes it, burning out the NAND chips on the SSD
So, shite design is basically what you're saying. Personally, I prefer function over form as I'm not a fashion victim.
That'll be the 2V5 NAND VREG controller (there's a couple of others). Yes, on things like the A1990, A2141 the BGA chip VREGs are sitting on the outer edge of the logic board near the air vents and with no underfill or similar physical protective barriers; either this part, or there's a nearby cap, will over time get exposed to dust and moisture which starts a corrosion issue which in turn ultimately makes the VREG fail and you'll see often something higher than 2V5 going in to the NAND, or, if the cap nearby gets corroded enough it'll start a carbonising effect as the corrosion works it way through the logic board.
90% of the A1990 / A2141 machines repaired here are failing because of these physical corrosion failure issues.
@@pldanielsThe legend himself!
Do you happen to know if a2442s have the same defect? Wondering if I should cancel my order.
@@AlibifortheAfterlife no, the M1/2 series actually did seem to learn lessons and they've mostly put their crucial VREG stuff under shields or away from such edges. Not to say there won't be othe new and exciting issues but the SSD VREG thing seems to have been a thing only for the A1990 / A2141 thus far
Ah, so just like a Commodore64 power supply (except it took the C64 power supply more years to reach that failure point)
I manage a fleet of 100 PCs in my company and saw many broken HDDs but not even once had a damaged SSD. Some are up to 7 years old and Soldered NVM ssd's are not too uncommon here and we don't even buy very large drives. I never buy PCs with less than 16gb Ram to prevent excessive swapping. I dont' believe any regular user will ever reach the TBW of it's disk.... At least not before the battery has died and the external aspect of the case will make me buy another computer for this user.
The over-voltage problem you mention is just the result of a terrible motherboard design by Apple and I smell a class action coming at them. Computers are not supposed to fry their SSD.
It reminds me of the Nvidia chips problem on Mac Book Pros a few years ago, which to be honest was better handled by Apple in terms of after-sales support than by most PC manufacturers similarly affected by that same plague (those Nvidia chips were the culprits).
Maybe it depends on software that your users use. Personally I understood that something wrong with my 8GB M1 when started to use Adobe Lightroom (software that uses 70% of RAM at any system and has no slider to adjust it), and noticed, that it writes 10TB per day of usage due to swap. So right now I'm not using this software on my Mac anymore, and turned off swap completely (unfortunately, I don't know is it possible to activate OOM killer, so sometimes it freezes, when open too much apps).
Apple had no choice but the handle the Nvidia issue the way they did. They also passed on 99% of the costs to Nvidia so it cost them almost nothing.
I'm still using my 2015 2.8 ghz 16gb i7 because I can easily upgrade it myself. I never bothered with the T1's with SSD on the motherboard and nothing but USB-C ports because the extra speed meant nothing to me if I have to totally reconfigure all of my hardware and software and pay premium price for a tiny hard drive. Here's hoping that you can slap an NVME Port on to the motherboard of a 2021 or later 14" and 16" MBP in the near future. Those are the only MBP's that I've gotten excited about since 2015 because they have flexible ,sensible connectivity and MagSafe too!
After 2 times internal SSD got fried/die, I finally conclude to go for external nvme casing and booting from TB3 cable. All it was my random trial and error method. To me SMART was a jock. Surprised to see your video. Thanks for beautifully explained video. In other words I must say the video is the summary of my 2 years of struggle with my imac. Thanks for the video, Keep doing more. I have already subscribed to your channel. Thanks.
What case you use?
@@colindoyle9876 I use ORICO Thunderbolt 3 M.2 Dual-bay Docking Station. Sorry my earlier reply got deleted as it contain a link.
Swap does not work as you explained it. It usually moves to swap longer time not used memory pages (parts). Thus this pages are just written once in many cases and never used again. So the effect on ssd lifespan is small. But bigger RAM is always good to have.
Yeah! And there's also RAM Compression
You wrong
Yes and no. It will page out pages that have low hit rate in ram.
So if you are multi tasking and switching between applications when starved for ram, there will be a lot of swapping ... hence the name ... swap.
It may not be exaggerated as he explained, but it certainly play a very important role on fastening the wearing out speed. The TBW of one with 8G RAM is actually increased very much faster than those with 16G RAM when they have the same size of storage.
There's also a need to make a distinction between the types of SSDs used. Older MacBooks used MLC or TLC SSDs which are slower but generally will last longer than the new cheap consumer QLC SSDs
High end Samsung ssds are tlc/mlc
You’re providing better quality content as time goes by. Keep up the good work!
Thanks Julien Mac, will do! :)
After knowing all this, why would anyone buy a macbook with soldered ram and ssd? Mind boggling.
I use my MacBook Pro professionally for work from home job + iOS app development, I buy a new MacBook then run it for about 3 years under AppleCare and then sell it right before AppleCare runs out. This way I still get a lot of resell value from my device as well and the upgrade is about half the cost of a new MacBook and it never truly 'ages' to point of breaking completely.
I've had nothing but trouble with windows machines, OS randomly resetting, motherboard failures, PSU failures, I am getting really tired of people shitting on Apple when the alternative is just as or even more unreliable in the long term.
And you cheat your buyers and promote this. Do you understand that you become a rascal?
This Channel deserve minimum 1 Million Subscribers ❤
Planned obsolescence , no way to repair and reuse, typical Apple tactics.
I can’t believe you showed me the things that you did. I had no idea that these problems exist. Thank you for putting this information out there. Thanks 🙏
Thank you very much for the detailed information. Even for 150 TBW, someone writing 50 GB every day, would need 3000 days to reach this. But just in case, I will be storing my large videos directly to an external disk.
Rarely a 256gb ssd have 150tbw
@tanyaspotting that’s a lot, mine writes about 50 GB per day, as I check it with iostat. This is about 1.5 TB per month
The point is, if it runs out of RAM, it can actually swap a terabyte onto the SSD in a day. Imagine if it writes just 200 MB per second, it can reach 1TB in less than two hours of usage.
@Tanya Spotting how many total byte written you got now, I just bought a second hand MacBook air m1 that have 210 TB byte written already. And i saw that most of 256 gb ssd only have lifecycle of 150 TBW. So what should i do? What is the write cycle of the mac m1 air 256?
@@icecantgaming944holy cow. Use an external ssd and copy macos there
I have old laptop, in which I have same ssd from 2016. And I know in one day It will die, but I don't keep important stuff permanently in one place. Once I had mechanical drive fail on me, I nearly lost years worth work on that. So backing up is a mandatory thing for me. There is so many reasons not to use Mac's, but people are still buying them.
Nice video. My office issued M1 MacBook Pro has 64 GB RAM and 1TB SSD, so it's most likely going to outlast its useful life. My M2 MacBook Pro has 16GB RAM and 512 GB SSD. I don't run too much heavy stuff on it, so I haven't noticed it swapping. But it's shocking how much memory apps use these days. The UA-cam browser tab displaying this video is currently taking 0.6GB! So, it's easy for the usage to quickly add up if you have lots of stuff open. I also have a 2014 Mac mini with a (replaceable) SSD that's going strong - used primarily as a media server, so it hardly does much writes.
BTW, Random Access Memory doesn't mean what you say - "data is randomly moving in and out". Here, random simply means you can access data (read or write) in approximately the same time, regardless of which location it is stored at. Contrast this with a Hard Disk or even tape where certain locations take longer to access than others.
Hdd are random access... it means an address will take you to the location of the data. A tape is not because you have to sequentially access
I am kind of glad that I chose my M1 Pro MacBook Pro with 16 GB of unified RAM and 1 TB storage. I use Logic Pro and should really put its data onto an external drive, but, then again, this limits its portability. Hmm…
I used a 2012 MacBook Air with 128 GB of storage and 4 GB of RAM for 9 years, incl. Garage Band and Logic Pro projects. My SSD died once, but not really. A computer repair service soldered it, and I didn't even loose any data; and the Mac worked fine after the fix until I sold it to a friend as a beginner MacBook. As far as I know it is still working fine, haven't heard anything different.
Thanks for the great explanatory video. Keep up the good work! :)
How many TBs written?
Good video, but still.. instead of encouraging people to just live with the problem and learn to deal with it, I’d suggest to not buy any apple product that has a soldered SSD.
I just bought my 2nd Mac mini from 2012 where it was still possible to swap ram and HHD/SSD and even go dual SSD. And upgraded it to its max.
I could have easily bought the newest one, but I’m not supporting that sh*t.
I think the only real solution to this problem, is to boycott Apple products that are not meant to be upgraded.
They love to talk about saving the environment, using recycled materials and reinvent packaging, but everything they do is just to make more money!! Does no one see that?
SSDs are a gold mine for apple strategically. It makes me shudder when I'm reminded that they're soldered on.
For anyone that's ever attempted data recovery, it's always harder to recover a corrupted SSD. HDDs give you indicators that something is going wrong and you have multiple avenues to attempt recovery but an SSD is ridiculously more difficult to recover data from successfully.
I was replacing the HDD on an old laptop that was pretty slow with HDD issues popping up and after cloning the drive it ran almost like new.
My friend around the same time sent me their SSD to see if I could fix it because it was glitching and intermittently experiencing slowdowns. While I could access the drive, certain files would trigger intense slowdowns if I interacted with them. I had an SD card behave the same way before and knew it was corrupted.
While a partially corrupted HDD can be cloned, SSDs refuse to even engage wih any cloning software or hardware.
I only use an SSD in my laptop because Windows 10 doesn't run well on HDDs because they skipped optimizing their file system because they didn't think they needed to anymore with faster SSD speeds. I only bought that laptop because it had a secondary HDD that I could offload the heavy file manipulation to.
While SSDs have a finite number of writes before burning out, HDDs are only limited by their moving parts wearing down. They actually run longer, the less you cycle them on and off.
We're making it so much more expensive for the average person to recover from a solar flare...
I’ve always been a firm believer in HDD’s for longevity. SSD’s may be faster but they seem far less durable. As you said HDD’s theoretically have an unlimited amount of write cycles whereas SSD’s have an absolute finite lifespan. I have 25 year old HDD’s that still work fine. They also mostly start to fail slowly whereas SSD’s often die rapidly with very little hope of recovery.
Excellent!! I did do well getting the M1 Max with 64 RAM and 2TB storage, still performing great and 99% SSD lifespan available.
The question is, once SSD dies can be replaced by another??
Straight after having finished installing and configuring my Mac Studio Max (standard model with 32GB ram and 512GB storage) I moved my user profile to a TB3 NVMe enclosure with a 2TB Seagate Firecuda 530 in it. That leaves the precious internal storage for te OS and Applications. True that the internal storage is faster, but you won’t notice a difference in real life. So when I copy a file to my desktop it is actually on the external storage, this goes for all user profile related data like Pictures, Documents and Download folders.
Good option and as you say the speed thing will hardly be noticed as long as you use a good external SSD
use Thunderbolt as OS Drive
@@UserUser-ww2njsomething that's worth noticing is that iPhones that came with 64gb of on board storage are dying because of the nand flash reaching its end of life. On my part, I don't have this issue, all my android phones have micro SD card slot and as Louis Rossman stated before, iPhone design is highly flawed which happens to be true .
As someone who uses android, I will never own phones like galaxy s23 ultra, the S20 ultra, s9 , these ones are worth keeping
@@danteerskine7678 I had noticed in quite a few videos that there was a problem with the Nand , coincidence or planned i wonder . Very easy for them to put on a little chip with a countdown timer and set it to fail a component .
I have Andoid as well and would never have an Iphone . My current phones are Oneplus 5t and OneplusNord . . The 5t is getting on a bit but still works flawlessly , the Nord is my backup phone , a bit essential where I am . Also a Samsung s8 but thats a long story 😂 . None of mine have an SD card slot but the 5t has 124gb so more than enough
On top of all this great advice you can also use your MacBook every other day and you will double the lifespan of the SSD.
I always back-up my data on a old school harddrive. I never experienced problems doing that, it's slow…, but I only put data on that HD drive that I barely use. I hate Apple for soldering SSD's. And Apple cares about the environment. 😂😂😂 I call that greenwashing!
i always never buy the touch bar versions as you can replace the ssd on a non touch bar but not the touchbar version or at least you can in a 2017 macbook pro
Best video I've seen in a long time, very informative and explained so well!
@@thecoffeesloth thank you for watching!
Thank you very much. This information is priceless. My wallet, my Mac, and myself, will benefit greatly from this information in my daily Mac usage going forward.
bro dooo u teach chemistry your teaching skills are undoubtedly god level
I contemplated whether I needed the 64GB RAM version and now I’m glad I chose that option. I have seen spikes exceeding 32GB of RAM (by a tiny bit). Thanks for this valuable info!
Get 32GB RAM if most of the time your biggest projects and all the other apps that you use simultaneously are below 28GB RAM. In a few months with new updates you're going to have more RAM usage. But generally 99% of all people don't need more than 32GB RAM, and I personally would not count on "investing for the future" in terms of RAM on Crapbooks because of crApple's famously non-existent reliability and for their products bricking themselves after just 3-4 years compared to the likes of Asus laptops that can easily work for more than 10 years if they are maintained well (repasted on time - I would recommend everyone use PTM7950 to repaste the CPU and GPU, it's fantastic, it's better than all thermal pastes and it's going to serve forever and it will basically never dry out compared to a thermal paste or liquid metal (incorrect application of which would require you to reapply after a year if it wasn't enough, or will absolutely destroy your entire CPU/GPU and motherboard and make you broke if you apply too much and if just one little droplet makes its way out of the CPU die))
@@one_step_sideways Soldered storage and RAM is just a way to profit off of FOMO. And people seem to buy the BS left and right.
@@one_step_sideways that is good RAM advice. Sky’s the limit if your use case requires (I have 128GB on my desktop Lolol) but yeah 32gb for a laptop is generally sufficient for most. I cringe that 8 and 16 are still relatively common configurations…
@@vivek_v actually its to keep the design thin , quiet, keep thermals down and allow memory to be unified to the SoC
I knew most of this information, but I felt like I understood it for the first time with these visuals.
Great video. Definitely informative and easy to comprehend. My previous MacBook Pro, 2011, still kicking, anything new should give u that life span or more, I think!
on my old m1 MacBook Air I had the swap memory usage, I got the base model back in 2020 and I was using around 2-5gb of swap when using Final Cut and Xcode, but now I got ht else model M2 MacBook Air 15 inch with the upgraded 10-core GPU and I disabled swap memory so it never uses it plus editing all my files off iCloud or my 2tb Samsung t5 drive. On the old one I had in 3 months 19TB out of 150TBW but now after 1 month of use I have only 500gb out of 150TBW. The performance is the same even when editing 4K on Final Cut and it works butter smooth.
It is easy to see TBW your SSD already used with software.
For Windows I use Open Hardware monitor.
I put the SSD in the computer 2 years ago. It has 12TBW. So it's using 6TBW a year. It's a 500gb Samsung 860 evo drive. It claims at least 180TBW, so it could last up to thirty years :)
So no worries about TBW :)
Thank you for the info. I need to check it out my SSD. I do write lots of days the d delete there and write more. Caching stuff
"Could"!
@@izzzzzz6 The warranty is 5 years, and its easy to replace it if I want to
@@Helios.vfx. What's ya current TBW now?
@@petrlaskevic1948 I don't know to be honest, I'd like to know.
Yes when I was looking for my new laptop the removable SSD was one of the main points to have. Only issue I had with my Asus Zephyrus G14 was garbage wi-fi card, which I was also able to swap with good intel card.
What they should have done is to let customer replace SSD instead of buying new entire Macbook
Can’t replace the ssd easily, it’s soldered onto the main board.
You recognize that marketing strategy right? That Is the reason why they do it!
This is one of the best video I have ever watched related to macbook devices, its true a crazy life, Louis Rossman said the same, and he suggested even old 2012 mac and not those latest devices having soldered SSD. true crazy life
I'm not entirely afraid that my SSD will fail due to too much data being written to it.
I've got a 1TB Samsung 970 Evo as my PC's system drive, had it for about two years and even with HEAVY use I have only written 15TB to it.
Considering I use my MacBook in instances when I work remotely and offload pretty much all tasks to an external NVMe SSD, I think it's more likely some IC is gonna fry long before I write 150TB to my laptop's SSD.
I feel the same about my 2016 small 12 rMB. Only thing is I get feeling that new Macbooks blast the NVMe with 12 volts without having to use up all your TWB.
I’ve got an 1TB M1 MacBook Air running Sonoma with 5 Safari tabs open, Finder, Messages, Mail, Maps, Photos, Calendar, Notes, Music, Numbers, Calculator, System Settings, System information and Activity Monitor open and it’s not using swap memory. Memory used is 6.72GB of 8GB.
What a fantastic video! Great content and many many thanks for explaining it like the way it should be! Cant wait for the remaining parts. Not to mention the humour! Haha! Subscribed!
Glad you enjoyed it! thank you for watching! :)
Most People will not be able even reach any were near 150TBW on 128GB drive or 300TBW on 256GB drive even. For a 128GB drive with 150TBW you need to write 82GB data daily to reach 150TBW limit in 5 years. So 99.9% consumers will never reach the rated lifespan even majority of PRO will not be able to reach it unless it is a server doing data warehousing or chia mining 24X7.
No. Not true..people rendering encoding videos will wear ssd faster
@@Teluric2then I see the MacBook as a “suffering from success”: It’s powerful, portable and convenient, but the SSD can’t handle too much abuse. Better use a desktop for this stuff anyway
This is not a justification for soldered SSD!
@@aravindtapple fans will literally justify anything 😂
What abput the swap memory?
Superb video! Your clear and concise explanation of TBW cycles is invaluable in helping to make an informed purchase of a new (or recent) device, and how to mitigate the inevitable entropy of SSDs leveraging M2 or other external storage for large files. Also, major bonus points for the humor!
Excellent video! I think it's the best informative video I've ever watched. You deserve an award. The narration and graphics are the seller. You made it easy to understand a sophisticated (or at least the least explained) topic. You're a good teacher. You are an excellent content producer. Thank you for making this video and helping people understand this important topic.
The way you make these videos I'M HOOKED ❤
You can literally make this style of videos on any topic I CAN WATCH THEM FOR HOURS ❤
TBW is actually to do with physics. Basically the NAND circuit in the SSD chip can only be cycled a limited number of times. The TBW grows with disk size as bigger disks reserve more 'spare' nand cells to use when some go bad.
Simple free way to check your TBW is open a terminal window and type the command
iostat -Id disk0
(that is a capital I and lowercase d)
The last number is the number of bytes written since new. Divide by 1000000 to get TBW (actually 1048576 but a million is close enough)
I've seen in another vid that sometimes it's down to the chip that supposed to send the correct voltage to the SSD going screwy and sending too much voltage to the SSD, burning out the NAND chips
Every electronic piece is disposable... Don't forget about our 2010' window laptops who were dying after 2 years, no matter what you did with it
Just us things while considering as they are; do frequent saves etc
You guys are awesome! Everytime you upload I learn something new. This time, THANK GOD I did not buy a new MBP. Lol. Still have a 2012 (pre retina) going strong. You know, from the era apple products were not suck..
We're still using non retina 2012 A1286 ;)
You both have to be joking… I have the same 13” 2012 and it is ancient.
Newest are much much better.
@@sebastianturley4372 Dont want to sound rude, but my work MacBook 16" M1 Max chip 2021 32GB 1TB is the best ever so far... Again you are living in the past.
@@roverrr23how many TBW?
One thing though, when you delete a file, the file isn’t erased. Only he entry for the file is deleted, the file stays, and that saves TONS of writing to the ssd!
I hate soldered SSDs, the thought of it just dying 😡 and if that wasn’t bad enough they have a data retention issue too 😩 some say the data will just fade away after about 10 years if not rewritten so I guess a lot of Nintendo Wiis will start dying soon ohh and Apple Silicon Macs keep their firmware on their SSD so if it breaks the Mac can no longer do anything like booting from an external system drive!
This channel is a Gem 💎. Content will age well. Please continue!
I think you missed one important point for the SSDs (not only for the soldered ones in the Macbooks), if you erase a file on the SSD, you will also loose parts of your TBW, as the the cells are cleared what is also a writing process, that makes all even worse, you can try to use more provision to have more spare-cells, what can expand the lifespan of the SSD, but i don't know if this works at the fruit computers. Also very important the more states a cell has the worse the endurance SLC, TLC, QLC.
My conclusion: avoid like a plague soldered SSDs, avoid like another plague proprietary formats of SSDs. ONLY standard connectors (Sata, msata, m2)
I think you got this wrong. Deleting a file does not write over the data blocks. No OS does that, you need special software to do that.
Deleting a file only adds the blocks to the free blocks list and removes the entry in the folder.
@@robertbrzheintzbrz147 But before writing new data to the cells they are erased e.g cell having a value 55 is then set to 00 and then rewritten with FF as far as i have heard. I'm not specialist in that things, but i think especially the need for swapping due to insufficient space is a bigger issue than most users think. Its not like with the hdds where the old data were simply overwritten.
@@robertbrzheintzbrz147 Yes and no. When you delete, not yet, but then when TRIM runs to prepare cells for new data, it is.
Awesome presentation Dude. I've been sitting on the fence with a load of info on Macbooks M2 models . This has put me on the ground . My 2011 has battled on this far and now deciding on windows world where that shit loads up temp files on your SSD
upgrade your 2011 macbook to windows 10.
Amazing job! you have a new sub. Just to say in relation to 12:24 : I've a 16GB of ram Macbook Air M1 and it uses swap memory even with a lot of ram available. I think this is just the way macOS works
It just " apple cant make faulty products its the way it works" must find an excuse
@@Teluric2 This is not a fault. MacOS uses it even when is RAM available because the operating system may decide to use swap space to temporarily store data that it anticipates it will need again in the near future, so that it can free up physical RAM for other things, this helps the overall performance and Windows/Linux do domething similar
The fault is the SSD Lifespan
@@alex.x8782 The fault is the soldered SSD, actually. If it were user replaceable, no issue would be raised whatsoever.
@@alex.x8782 If the ssd was replaceable it wouldn't have been an issue and this is why some people see mac users as sheeple. Every other laptop brand can have their memory, hard drive and sometimes even the processor replaced by the user and it's not even a hard thing to do since most laptops just have a removable cover which exposes these parts.
@@phamnguyenductin Yeah, you're right
If you watch a lot of UA-cam videos, the videos also get written to your SSD as it's buffered. I have no idea about other sites, but I do know for a fact UA-cam does it.
Best way to prevent SSD from dying is to leave the MacBook powered off. 😂
Yes off all the time
For the first time in my life i was considering an apple product with the M1 / M2... not anymore, thank you!
I used an external ssd when the internal died. Good thing about Mac is you can boot a proper system even from external USB!
That was before 2019 Macs- Now the BIOS is inside the NVMe.
This video was awesome, I am aware of all this stuff already but I’ve never seen a video this good explaining it to the average person. I will definitely refer people to this video when they ask me what they should get. Bravo!
If someone make a replacement mainboard with removable nvme drive and ram using the MBP mainboard form factor to serve as a drop in replacement, they can be very rich.
While you're right, they're likely to be sued by Apple into nirvana :/. Apple benefits heavily off of planned obsolescence.
The framework laptops have drop in motherboards that you can buy, but they aren't MacBooks
One of the best explanations I've seen on UA-cam.....subscribed !
What nonsense... "150TBW" does NOT mean it will die once you reached those "limits". Just like a car is not magically stop running just because you reached the 50.000 miles your car seller gives you guarantee for.
It's the MINIMUM the manufacturer guarantees until it MAY stop working. But in reality, the limit is much much higher than that.
There are even a lot of tools to get to know how much life span your SSD as left and how hard you're able to hit it. On my 512GB MacBook Air for example, I would have to write over 140GB to the SSD Every. Single. Day. To reach the probably maximum life span after over 9 years(!!!). 9 years of constant 140GB/day.
No, SSDs do exactly "magically stop running" and there's little you can fo when it happens. And the moment when it happens is absolutely unpredictable.
I have a 2014 iMac, and a 2017 MacBook Pro. I use them constantly for my job. I’m a web developer. I’ve never had any of the problems mentioned in this video. Just saying.
@@MichaelThomasDevjust because YOU haven't, doesn't mean others haven't. I use s 2015 MBA daily which I can replace the SSD, but I haven't had to. If it does die one day, it's replaceable, unlike newer macTrash and I can keep using my Mac while others need an entirely new computer.
A lot of companies have special engineers that work on how to limit the lifespan of the device. They have two methods: hardware and software. Hardware is with the limited TBW in combination with soldering it on the mothermotherboard, and with the voltage thing zapping it. Then they got limited OS updates. Older devices can the new mac OS just fine, but they fase them out so you can not download any new programs from the macstore because it will not run on the older OS. There are workarounds for this but it is kind of tedious to get Sanoma on older devices. But once you get it done what you see is: the performance is great, zero issues. So they are throttling it on purpose to a max version of OS. It is a choice. Good thing i bought the maxed out version, i never knew the smallest ram and ssd will do 4 times as fast as the bigger ones. Great tips also, thanks.
All those UA-cam Apple Gurus promoting buying the base level MacBooks because they are a much better deal than maxed out models. Turns out they were dishing wrong advice. Unless you’re the type to buy a MacBook every 2 years…
I’m glad that they at least made the Mac mini have replaceable ssds
$800 for a 2tb ssd is the most jewish thing I have ever seen.
Great video! I suspected that an external drive would help me preserve the internal SSD of my MacBook air better. Now my suspection is confirmed. Also, when I was looking for my first Mac, I bought the one with a 512GB SSD rather than the 256GB one but I wasn't mindful about how that related to the lifespan of it. So I ended up getting some extra lifespan too. Definitely we who aren't the rich folks who love Apple products must be really careful not to deplete the equipment too soon. Thanks so much for the info!
1st of all. NEVER BUY MAC. IT IS TRASH. 2nd, only buy pc with swappable ram and ssd.
Buy only old mac with upgradeable ram and ssd. But of course those old macs have already been "orphaned" by Apple. so you need to run windows on old macs.
Yes, I was around when Apple started and revered macintoshes in the 90s. But I’m pissed at them for the crap they’ve neglected for us customers in the last 15 years
what a painful video. Could have been 6min if it wasn't all about repeating the same sensational words over and over and over.
I heard that the bigger the SSD is the longer life it might get, as the same cells will be used less frequently reducing the wear. That being said, having 256GB and only keeping 10-20% free over a long period might kill it faster. However, I have an old mid-2014 MacBook Pro with 512 GB SSD where about 80% of the space was constantly taken and the SSD is still alive. That MacBook was used 18 hours per day 6 days a week over all the years till this moment so only the battery was replaced around 5 or 6 times. At the same time, my wife's SSD in a mid-2015 Mac Book Pro died under much more friendly conditions.
This is a good reason to shut off the PC when not in use. All activity f Read /Write is halted which includes virus scanning, page swapping, background tasks etc.
Secondly, eliminate read writes with software such as Diskeeper aka Dynamic I/O. In 3 years, I've saved 24 full days of read writes to the hard drive.
This TBW stuff has me reducing my image backups now.
You gave me several reasons why I should not to buy a Mac
Just reminder to all of us to always backup our data even if you have laptop with removable ssd
It would be so easy to make these the same NAND chips that are replaceable in the mac studio, but Apple doesn't want long lasting devices anymore since they can just sell you next year's upgrade
At 14:37 the lifetime percentage reported by the ssd usually is the percentage of backup blocks left. So technically speaking if everything is in check with the SSD it should work properly until 0% lifetime.
Also the TBW is just the "guarantee" a manufacturer gives to its product to show the quality of it. An SSD can last much longer or shorter than that. It should be taken as "it will fail around that value" and not a "it will die the moment it reaches that value"
Fantastic advice. Appreciate your take on this. It's not cheapskate to want your expensive, valuable Macbook to last much longer. The concept of swappable SSD storage on laptops is critical and when Apple chose to solder an expendable part, they doomed it for eventual failure regardless of people using it as intended. My laptop had one SSD failure after just 20 months, but the second one lasted more than 5 years. Now it's failing again. It's too bad Apple doesn't abandon this bad practice.
I have learn a lot about Mac ssd. Thanks a lot. I’m using a 2017 Mbp with a 256gb ssd. 27TB data units written. I will change the thermal paste and the battery and for sure stop copy a lot of data in this Mac. Thanks again dude ❤
As an engineer, i just learned a lot from you, thank you for saving me the stress