When buying a Mac computer, you must pile all your budget on the memory, and you must remember it.
by Poster
Jan 25, 2025
75
My last generation intel mbp16 had a hard drive mounted on the wall. I don't know why. Of course, this has been a long time ago.
Recently, I was going to sell the M2 Mini with 8G memory and replace it with the M4 Mini. When I checked the life of the hard drive through smartmontools and told my group friends that the hard drive had written 10T after one year of use, something a group friend said made me very unhappy. He said that his computer could not write 10T even after 5 years of use.
When I get angry, well, I'm selling equipment here. If you say this, how can I sell my equipment? He was kicked out of the group when he got angry.
However, the more I think about it, the more wrong it is. What is the concept of 10T? If you write 10 T a year, and if you don't stop every day for 365 days, you will write 28GB a day. However, my M2 mini is a backup machine, and if you really use it for no more than 100 days, 365 days a year, then this is scary. According to 100 days, it means writing 102GB per day.
This is very, very, very scary. A computer that can only browse the web has a hard disk of 102GB a day. I was surprised myself.
So, I checked the iMac with 8G memory I bought in 2022 through smartmontools, and I was confused when I checked it. The hard disk write capacity was 57T.
What is the concept of 57T? The theoretical TBW of a 256GB hard disk should be 100-150TB, which means that 57T has consumed half of the theoretical life of this hard disk.
I checked the [Disk] through the [Activity Monitor] that comes with the Mac and found that the largest writing process is the kernel _ task process with a PID of 0. Almost if the computer puts it there and doesn't operate anything, the daily writing is more than 20GB.
Recently, I traveled for 5 days, and I came back to take a look at [Activity Monitor]. The disk write volume is 1.25 TB
https://i.imgur.com/G1rnijs.jpeg
I have looked through a lot of information and asked a lot about GPT, and the basic conclusion is that [insufficient memory will cause macOS to frequently use memory compression and Swap files (Swap), thereby increasing the amount of hard disk writes, which is manifested in the frequent writing of data by the kernel _ task process.]
In other words, when choosing a Mac computer with 8G memory, you should not only worry about whether it is enough for daily use, but also consider whether the hard disk life is enough to borrow.
Therefore, when buying a Mac computer again, please pile all your budget on the memory, and try not to buy a beggar's version of the memory device.
Of course, posting this article is not to create hard disk life anxiety for you, but at least, this feature should be well known.
Replies
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Anonymous241 Jan 26, 2025I looked at my 48g1t mbp and it has been written 38T in 14 months. 8g has been eliminated now, and there is basically no need to pay too much attention to the write amount of configuration memory swap above 16g. However, if the main force is used, the hard disk should start at least 512g.
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Anonymous242 Jan 26, 202524GB mac used for less than 3 months, writes 5T
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Anonymous243 Jan 27, 2025June '24 M3's MBA 16 +512 Data Units Read: 44,859,328 [22.9 TB] Data Units Written: 33,266,221 [17.0 TB] Power On Hours: 645
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Anonymous244 Jan 27, 20258G does pull across I'm still using 15 16G mbp
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Anonymous245 Jan 27, 2025What software did the landlord use to take the screenshot
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Anonymous246 Jan 27, 2025Let me give you some reference data. When I developed before, the daily write volume was about 30g (basically no need to swap partitions)
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Anonymous247 Jan 27, 2025This is the feature of OS X. It has nothing to do with how much memory you buy for a mac. Search reddit. A bunch of mac users with 64g and 128g memory posted posts complaining about why they still use swap if they have enough memory. The reason is very simple. Apple designed Apple like this. The bulk of the profit is that hardware definitely cannot let you pass on your family. Compared with memory, the life of hard drives is much shorter. The same is true for iOS. Why does Apple only give 4g when Android has 8g memory in the same period? One is that the CPU performance was leading at that time, and the other is that Apple used a lot of swap android windows software and hardware are separated, so there is no such problem. However, what kind of memory expansion domestic mobile phone manufacturers do now has the same meaning as Apple's
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Anonymous248 Jan 27, 2025My 3-year-old M1Pro 32 + 1T development machine wrote 829TB and it is still fine The smart information actually contains the usage percentage and spare space information. My 829T only has 22% usage and 99 spare space. It is not bad at all & This is too much for you
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Anonymous249 Jan 27, 2025@ Anonymous247 plans to scrap
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Anonymous250 Jan 27, 2025What group should protect from lightning?
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Anonymous124 Jan 28, 2025@ Anonymous132 # 56 This is called out of context Just look at what the group friends say, and the later op kicks people out without mentioning a word
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Anonymous69 Feb 6, 2025M2 Max 32G 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: 1% Data Units Read: 155,615,902 [79.6 TB] Data Units Written: 88,854,597 [45.4 TB] Host Read Commands: 9,863,863,744 Host Write Commands: 1,392,178,236 Controller Busy Time: 0 Power Cycles: 726 Power On Hours: 1,757 Unsafe Shutdown: 14 Media and Data Integrity Errors: 0 Error Information Log Entries: 0
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Anonymous251 Mar 8, 2025@ Anonymous252 safari sperm leakage is famous.
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Anonymous253 Mar 12, 2025The same goes for 64g memory, Mac hasn't shut down for two days Data read: 236.32 GB Data written: 165.17 GB I definitely didn't use so much summary to say that it's the Mac system that's it
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Anonymous254 Mar 31, 2025Yes the biggest problem with mac is memory.. The memory is too small, the swap library can't flash the hard drive