Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Has the Apple Silicon excessive disk read/write issue been fixed?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 144 posts

Re: Ask HN: Has the Apple Silicon excessive disk read/write issue been fixed?

#91

Post by paulmd »

unfocused wrote: post #33

M1 Air 16G 1TB (Bought on Nov 2020 - 1y 10 months old) I think I'm second on this page with "unsafe shutdowns" with 62. It's used by 4 people, 2 adults, 2 kids and heavily used pretty much all day and night. Lots of web, and video watching. Some very light development and a ton of email :) I think the unsafe shutdowns are due to my kids trying to run Steam and other games that may or may not work properly, e.g. Farmi…

re: unexpected shutdowns, don't forget thunderbolt hotplug/hot-unplug failures. they happen even on Apple silicon. I've had at least a couple on my M1, I had them with my work Dell, my work MBP i9 (lolrip) actually has been probably the most stable tbh, but even still it happens occasionally.

Re: Ask HN: Has the Apple Silicon excessive disk read/write issue been fixed?

#92

Post by paulmd »

alexjplant wrote: post #20

2020 M1 Air running whatever the latest beta macOS is. Not too shabby all things considered... I mostly do light dev work and music production (primarily live instrumentation so not too much in the way of sample-based plugins) so this kind of makes sense. === START OF SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Tempera…

I got mine at the start of july, I am at 3.27tb/2.12tb for my 16GB/256GB M1 Air in 78 hours, 11 unsafe shutdowns. I use it as a browser (excessive firefox tabs) and discord client and terminal mostly, light dev stuff (fast in intellij lol) etc. Kinda whatevs, that's what the swap is there for, I'm not worrying about my SSD getting used up in only 15 years or whatever.

I keep half an eye on the task manager (put it on the dock) and if you see red (kernel time) start to really spike up it can indicate swapping and it's time to reconsider your tabs. It can be other things too but it's one thing to keep an eye on. It's 16gb, it's not infinite, and if you have 1000 tabs open then yeah you're probably going to want to close some before you start something else, but, it's reasonable for consumption or light personal dev work (especially if you have a fileserver that could run containers/DBs). It's not gonna omg burn out the SSD the first time you have 100 tabs open.

8GB would be really really tight though, I'd imagine those machines might be swapping quite a bit more, that's a very low RAM spec other than for a consumption machine or terminal. And I wouldn't say no to more at 16gb either, too bad there's such a price increment on M2 24GB or MBP 14"/16".

Someday it'd be nice to move up to a 64gb spec and just have all the RAM, but there's other things I'd rather do, the MBA is fine for around the house etc, and I wanted to build a beefy fileserver to host services/containers anyway.

Re: Ask HN: Has the Apple Silicon excessive disk read/write issue been fixed?

#93

Post by tzs »

Wow...looks like I don't do much disk I/O compared to most people here. I'm on a 2017 iMac that I use for both personal stuff and work. It seems like most people here can do in a few months what it took me 5 years to do.

  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        39 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          10%
  Percentage Used:                    2%
  Data Units Read:                    163,453,178 [83.6 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 96,776,875 [49.5 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 4,760,816,278
  Host Write Commands:                3,237,489,546
  Controller Busy Time:               7,045
  Power Cycles:                       16,947
  Power On Hours:                     2,307
  Unsafe Shutdowns:                   109
  Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
  Error Information Log Entries:      0
I've got 64 GB of RAM so don't have much swap usage which probably helps.

I see everyone posting data for M1 Macs has an "Available Spare Threshold" of 99% whereas I've got 10%. What's the story there?

My understanding is that you want "Available Spare" to be as high as possible, and "Available Spare Threshold" is how low "Available Spare" can go before it is considering to be a failure, so the lower "Available Spare Threshold" the better.

Re: Ask HN: Has the Apple Silicon excessive disk read/write issue been fixed?

#94

Post by nieve »

cool_hw wrote: post #30
matai_kolila wrote: post #10

My MacBook Air (M1, 2020): === START OF SMART DATA SECTION === SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 32 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 1% Data Units Read: 8,843,213 [4.52 TB] Data Units Written: 12,256,532 [6.27 TB] Host Read Commands: 229,897,011 Host Write Commands: 452,963,…

As I shared in another post, compared to my linux machine, most of the posts, including yours, have atleast 5x-10x the usage. I understand that disk usage can vary wildly, but the linux machine I'm comparing with has been used through the work week for the past 6 years with VMs/docker and other large files.

On the other hand my linux Thinkpad has worryingly high numbers:

    Available Spare:                    100% 
    Available Spare Threshold:          10%
    Percentage Used:                    6%
    Data Units Read:                    123,210,825 [63.0 TB]
    Data Units Written:                 59,502,097 [30.4 TB]
    Host Read Commands:                 1,335,288,785
    Host Write Commands:                740,649,667
    Controller Busy Time:               3,494
    Power Cycles:                       3,069
    Power On Hours:                     5,339
    Unsafe Shutdowns:                   155

Re: Ask HN: Has the Apple Silicon excessive disk read/write issue been fixed?

#95

Post by cnagesh »

gjsman-1000 wrote: post #27

MacBook Air, M1, 512GB, purchased December 2020, 16GB RAM, as you can tell quite hammered for a web developer who doesn't use the main JavaScript frameworks or Docker almost ever. SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02) Critical Warning: 0x00 Temperature: 30 Celsius Available Spare: 100% Available Spare Threshold: 99% Percentage Used: 2% Data Units Read: 139,890,354 [71.6 TB] Data Units Written: 100,146,689 [51.2 TB…

    Unsafe Shutdowns:                   85
What does this mean? and looks like it is very high compared to others in the list

Re: Ask HN: Has the Apple Silicon excessive disk read/write issue been fixed?

#99

Post by boundlessdreamz »

M1 Mac Mini. Bought in July 2021

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

  SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
  Critical Warning:                   0x00
  Temperature:                        40 Celsius
  Available Spare:                    100%
  Available Spare Threshold:          99%
  Percentage Used:                    7%
  Data Units Read:                    254,524,681 [130 TB]
  Data Units Written:                 240,394,604 [123 TB]
  Host Read Commands:                 2,181,881,304
  Host Write Commands:                1,873,053,378
  Controller Busy Time:               0
  Power Cycles:                       107
  Power On Hours:                     1,681
  Unsafe Shutdowns:                   36
  Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
  Error Information Log Entries:      0

Re: Ask HN: Has the Apple Silicon excessive disk read/write issue been fixed?

#100

Post by cnagesh »

3 months old, macbook m1 pro:

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

        SMART/Health Information (NVMe Log 0x02)
        Critical Warning:                   0x00
        Temperature:                        31 Celsius
        Available Spare:                    100%
        Available Spare Threshold:          99%
        Percentage Used:                    0%
        Data Units Read:                    2,487,557 [1.27 TB]
        Data Units Written:                 3,113,562 [1.59 TB]
        Host Read Commands:                 53,266,591
        Host Write Commands:                89,763,325
        Controller Busy Time:               0
        Power Cycles:                       131
        Power On Hours:                     68
        Unsafe Shutdowns:                   6
        Media and Data Integrity Errors:    0
        Error Information Log Entries:      0
Post reply on HN