In February, news broke indicating that some M1-based Macs were writing far more SSD data than they should have been. We dug into the numbers and foun

Apple’s macOS 11.4 Update Fixed SSD Wear Reporting on M1 Macs

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2021-06-25 15:30:07

In February, news broke indicating that some M1-based Macs were writing far more SSD data than they should have been. We dug into the numbers and found little evidence of a trend. While some people reported eye-popping figures of as much as 347GB of data per hour being written to their drives, it was always possible that this was a measurement error — not an actual data-writing error.

According to Hector Martin, one of the individuals who first reported the problem, the issue may have been resolved in macOS 11.4.

Update on the macOS SSD thrashing issue: It seems the issue is fixed in 11.4. Feel free to try the betas if you're adventurous, or wait for the final release.

AppleInsider reports that a source they spoke to at Apple confirmed that the problem was always an issue with what the OS was displaying, not what it was actually doing behind the scenes. If you’ve been spooked by concerns that you’re killing your laptop by using it, rest easy. You haven’t been.

AppleInsider also reports that macOS 11.4 now properly reports uptime statistics, whereas previously, it didn’t. Both the number of uptime hours and the total amount of data supposedly written to SSD seemed off in the initial reporting, so we’re glad to see evidence that these were minor bugs rather than evidence of a hardware issue.