Some M1 Mac users face excessive SSD usage, affecting its lifespan

Some of the M1 Mac users are said to be facing an issue with their devices. Several of them have reported that the newly released Macs with M1 chipset are using excessive SSD, which in turn is affecting the lifespan of the storage chip and the entire device as well. As mentioned by users on Twitter and also on the Linus tech tips forums, the macOS indicates that the internal SSD in M1 Macs have registered “extremely high drive writes over relatively short time.”

One of the users even said that the SSD consumed around 13% of the maximum warrantable Total Bytes Written (TBW). It's worth mentioning that SSDs are based on chips rather than mechanical parts. And because of that, they have a predetermined lifespan based on how much they are used for reading and writing the data.

As you know that the more you write data to an SSD, the faster it will show wear off by showing slowness and even data corruption. And since the internal storage of M1 Macs are soldered right into the logic board, users might end up replacing the entire computer affected by the SSD defect.

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Usually, in regular use, this process can take around 10 years to take effect. However, today's reports indicate that the lifespan of an M1 Mac internal SSD might just be reduced to as little as two years due to the macOS behavior.

One of the users mentioned that the M1 MacBook Pro with 2TB storage and 16GB RAM has already registered 3% of total usage of the internal SSD just after two months. It's worth mentioning that Apple has not yet responded to this issue and the exact reason for this problem is not known yet.

According to speculations, this could be either due to M1 chip regularly using Mac’s internal storage for memory swap, which means using the SSD as a virtual RAM, or it is just a bug in the macOS Big Sur.