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Comment by tyingq | Hacker News Reader

How big of a drive is it? So far, most of the 3%+ used ones have 2TB drives, which is the opposite of what you would naively expect.

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On my older (3+ year now) MPB 16 with a 512GB drive I get:

    SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
    Critical Warning:                   0x00
    Temperature:                        41 Celsius
    Available Spare:                    100%
    Available Spare Threshold:          10%
    Percentage Used:                    22%
    Data Units Read:                    621,054,721 [317 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 483,003,547 [247 TB]
    Host Read Commands:                 9,028,855,382
    Host Write Commands:                3,924,827,022
    Controller Busy Time:               16,789
    Power Cycles:                       8,373
    Power On Hours:                     6,828
    Unsafe Shutdowns:                   375
    Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
    Error Information Log Entries:      271

My 2016 MBP shows very similar numbers, though my % is even higher (26%):

  SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        30 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    88%
  Available Spare Threshold:          2%
  Percentage Used:                    24%
  Data Units Read:                    356,923,637 [182 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 354,603,847 [181 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 2,817,724,668
  Host Write Commands:                2,270,199,931
  Controller Busy Time:               0
  Power Cycles:                       21,443
  Power On Hours:                     996
  Unsafe Shutdowns:                   21
  Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
  Error Information Log Entries:      0

Wow. How long ago did you get the MBP 16"? I've been running this system as my daily driver for >12 months and see very different numbers from you:

  smartctl 7.2 2020-12-30 r5155 [Darwin 20.4.0 x86_64] (local build)
  Copyright (C) 2002-20, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

  === START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
  Model Number:                       APPLE SSD AP8192N
  Serial Number:                      XXXXXXXXXXXXX
  Firmware Version:                   1161.100
  PCI Vendor/Subsystem ID:            0x106b
  IEEE OUI Identifier:                0x000000
  Controller ID:                      0
  NVMe Version:                       <1.2
  Number of Namespaces:               1
  Local Time is:                      Tue Feb 23 17:01:28 2021 PST
  Firmware Updates (0x02):            1 Slot
  Optional Admin Commands (0x0004):   Frmw_DL
  Optional NVM Commands (0x0004):     DS_Mngmt
  Maximum Data Transfer Size:         256 Pages

  Supported Power States
  St Op     Max   Active     Idle   RL RT WL WT  Ent_Lat  Ex_Lat
   0 +     0.00W       -        -    0  0  0  0        0       0

  === START OF SMART DATA SECTION ===
  SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

  SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        37 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          99%
  Percentage Used:                    0%
  Data Units Read:                    53,827,033 [27.5 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 37,342,497 [19.1 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 704,072,000
  Host Write Commands:                669,901,451
  Controller Busy Time:               0
  Power Cycles:                       234
  Power On Hours:                     528
  Unsafe Shutdowns:                   74
  Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
  Error Information Log Entries:      0

I think he means 16GB, not 16" as he mentions 3 yr old but 16" didn't exist 3 years ago.

Yeah, should have been more specific - it's a MacBook Pro (15-inch, 2017)

older doesn't mean anything relevant to anyone but you. Did it have its bar mitzvah or is it 3 years old, nobody knows but you.

Pardon me. I have 256GB model. While I used it daily for almost 2 months now it's still sounds crazy to have 25TBW for my usage. I didn't used it for any programming or compilation, no brew package builds either. All I did is used Firefox, downloaded like 30GB of torrents and then watched some Netflix. Also I haven't even moved any of my files to this laptop: so no photo archive, no email sync or dropbox, literaly no usage.

All I can hope for is that it's some kind of bug in SMART or might be Apple gonna fix it soon. Since I use my Kubuntu desktop with Samsung 850 PRO 256GB way more heavily and I barely got to 30TBW in like 4 years.

Torrents suck for SSD lifetime, the chunk size is typically 16kb but chunks aren’t downloaded whole and in order, so you might end up with a lot of wear and tear unless the file system and the torrent client/library are both working together to eliminate the partial writes.

However, it doesn’t seem that torrents are a common factor in user accounts, and 30GiB in torrents would not account for that much write amplification, so carry on!

Yea i'd personally be pretty annoyed if my macbook was just writing that much data in the background slowly wearing out my ssd, 25tb over 2 months is just silly.

checked my 2015 15" that i've been using non stop for over 3 years and it's at 96tb which is 2.6 a month.

You can also keep an eye on the data counter in activity monitor while it's on. At that kind of numbers you're doing to catch it even if it's periodic: it's got a running total too since the Mac was switched on.

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