Comment by AnthonyMouse

6 hours ago

Flash has finite write endurance. NVMe swap can burn through it pretty quick. Which is isn't that bad because if it wears out you can replace it... unless the drive is soldered.

2 comments

AnthonyMouse

spacedcowboy 2 hours ago

Mac SSDs are expected to last 8-10 years, even with high use. though Apple don't publish these values specifically, it's possible to start to extrapolate from the SMART data when it starts showing errors.

A good SSD ought to be able to cope with ~600TBW. My ~4.5-year-old MBP gives the following:

    smartctl --all /dev/disk0
    ...
    Data Units Read:                    1,134,526,088 [580.8 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 154,244,108 [78.7 TB]
    ...
    Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
    Error Information Log Entries:      0
    ...

I'm sure an 8GB RAM machine would use more swap than my 16GB one, but probably not much more, given that mine has had heavy use for development and most people don't use their laptops for anything like that. Even so, that would still put it well within the expectation of 8-10 years, and that's for a $600 laptop.

ChrisMarshallNY 3 hours ago

I’ve never had an SSD crap out because of read/write cycle exhaustion, and I’ve been using SSD almost exclusively, for over a dozen years. I’ve had plenty of spinning rust ones croak, though. You don’t solder those in, so it’s not really a fair comparison.

I did have one of those dodgy Sandisks, but that was a manufacturing defect.