Apple has begun its transition to M1 chips last year. Reviewers were impressed with M1 Mac’s performance, and benchmarks revealed the same. Now, M1 Mac users are complaining about hard drive health across multiple forums.

Professionals are worried about declining hard drive health and wondering how long will it last. Typically, TBW or total bytes written signifies the health of an SSD. In other words, it is the number of terabytes that can be written on a hard drive in its lifetime. M1 Mac users are experiencing a very high drive write rate over a short period.

2TB 16GB model. 3% used.

That means that for a 256GB model, proportionally, you'd expect ~30% usage.

If this is accurate, some of these machines aren't going to last half a year to 100%.

And that's a 16GB model. 8GB should be worse.

Holy shit. https://t.co/9HcmaYgJPT

— Hector Martin (@marcan42) February 15, 2021

Some more professional users of the new M1 Macbooks are experiencing extremely high drive writes over a relatively short time.
The most severe cases have “consumed” about 10-13% of the maximum warrantable TBW value of the SSDs (given their capacity & using values for equivalent market-available NVMe drives).

Considering the readings are accurate, then the M1 Mac SSD might last for less than a year. Furthermore, the SSD on M1 Mac is not user-replaceable, and this is something that is worrying the users. There is a possibility that this could be a bug. Some have added that such tools are known for misreporting. In all likelihood, the declining SSD health on Mac M1 might have something to do with reporting tool rather than the hardware.

Just to be clear: This is definitely a bug. It's software. It's macOS behavior. It can be fixed.

If Apple fixes this now, we're going to be fine.

I'm working on getting this reported.

— Hector Martin (@marcan42) February 15, 2021

The user updated his Tweet and explained how the “less than a year” calculation is not accurate. That said, he feels the wear rate is “still way too fast,” but not something one should be worried about. Others have added that this issue is not unique to M1 Mac, and some of the Intel Mac users are seeing strange readings.

Our Take

SSD offers a great deal of benefits over HDD. This includes faster read and writes speeds, fewer mechanical parts, and a short access time. However, data can be written on each storage cell about 3,000 to 100,000 times. Manufacturers give an estimated terabytes written. The rating tells you how much data can be written over the whole life span of the SSD. We hope Apple issues a clarification.