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Intel Macs - ticking time bomb?

wayne_rowley said:
I need to do some experimentation with buffer settings to see how RAM usage could be optimised for my typical projects. That could mean I need less RAM, but frankly I dont think I’d want less than what I currently have (32GB).
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MacOS is designed to use as much RAM as it can, and invariably "Memory Used" + "Cached Files" = all your RAM.
All CPUs can compress data, but the M-series CPUs dedicated hardware does seem very efficient at 'fitting more in'.
There are also efficiencies from the GPU and CPU sharing the same data. Currently, your Intel Mini is using 1.5Gb of RAM as separate memory for the graphics, so you will see a "saving" there.

Even when it does start swapping, the disk speed and memory bandwidth is sufficiently fast that performance is hardly affected.

Here's NotePerformer's NPPE engine happily using 37Gb on a Mac with 32Gb of RAM!!

Screenshot 15.png
 
wayne_rowley said:
So, I've managed to halve my Kontakt preload buffers, and that knocks around 25% off of the memory usage, with an average track now going from around 20Gb to 16GB. Not bad.

Unfortunately it's hammering my i5 CPU in some cases and I'm getting some dropouts due to CPU spikes during playback.

But it suggests I could get away with 24GB of RAM rather than 32.
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Thanks for sharing your results. This video, using an Apple Silicon Mac, may be of interest with regard to Pre-Load vs CPU loading:



Nominal impact on CPU is this gent's take.

NI's Evil Dragon has advised Kontakt can run a minimum pre-load buffer size when streaming from SSDs. Works well for me!
 
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Pier said:
Yeah but if you swap constantly you're reducing the lifespan of the ssd. I wouldn't recommend relying on it frequently.
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I keep hearing this and of course it makes theoretical sense but I don’t think I’ve heard even anecdotally of someone actually hitting the lifetime limit on one of these Apple drives.
 
Pier said:
Yeah but if you swap constantly you're reducing the lifespan of the ssd. I wouldn't recommend relying on it frequently.
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Do we have any data on the SSD failure rates of Apple base models over the years?

This article from 2021 claims that M1s were writing so much that they could use up "maximum TBW" within 2 years.
www.digitaltrends.com

M1 Mac Glitch Could Increase SSD Failure Rate | Digital Trends

Faulty behavior on the solid-state drives of Apple's newest Macs powered by the company's M1 chipset could lead to SSDs that fail in just two years.
www.digitaltrends.com www.digitaltrends.com

So where's the follow-up story on all the failing M1s?

Chances are that you'll upgrade your Mac because it hasn't got USB7 or isn't supported on the OS before your SSD runs out.
 
Thunderbolt 5 is where the big next steps happen. Bidirectional 80Gb/Sec will make networking domestic machines to create parallel processing supercomputers something that everyone can do at home. Need a faster computer, don’t sell the one you have, add a second Mac Mini or PC.
 
jbuhler said:
I keep hearing this and of course it makes theoretical sense but I don’t think I’ve heard even anecdotally of someone actually hitting the lifetime limit on one of these Apple drives.
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Under normal usage conditions an SSD will outlive its device and there's nothing to worry about.

It depends on many factors but if you're swapping heavily you will wear down the SSD after a couple of years.

SSDs are rated on how much data you can write on it. Basically the idea is you can expect a minimum of about 600 times the total capacity of the drive. This is not exact, it's a rule of thumb.

So if you have a 1TB SSD you can expect the drive to support at least 600TB to be written on it. It's a lot but if you're writing 500GB every day you will get there in 3 years or so. If you have a 500GB drive it's 1.5 years. Etc.

500GB/day of swapping is an extreme example but you get the idea.

benwiggy said:
This article from 2021 claims that M1s were writing so much that they could use up "maximum TBW" within 2 years.
Click to expand...
appleinsider.com

Apple resolved M1 Mac SSD wear reporting issue in macOS 11.4 | AppleInsider

Previous issues surrounding reporting tools reporting heavy wear on SSDs in Apple Silicon Macs now appear to be fixed in macOS 11.4
appleinsider.com appleinsider.com
 
Pier said:
500GB/day of swapping is an extreme example but you get the idea.
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Sure, I get the idea. What I'm saying is that I haven't seen any evidence, even anecdotal evidence that this has actually been happening. That apple insider story you posted suggests that even the early reports of rapid wear seem to have been an error in the tools not that the drives were in any danger of failing soon. So I continue to find it hard to know what to make of this "danger." And we're now far enough along the cycle that some of those early machines should be failing now if this is a real danger.
 
jbuhler said:
Sure, I get the idea. What I'm saying is that I haven't seen any evidence, even anecdotal evidence that this has actually been happening. That apple insider story you posted suggests that even the early reports of rapid wear seem to have been an error in the tools not that the drives were in any danger of failing soon. So I continue to find it hard to know what to make of this "danger." And we're now far enough along the cycle that some of those early machines should be failing now if this is a real danger.
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Those reports about the M1s were caused by an error in macOS.

Again, under normal circumstances, SSDs will outlive the device they are installed on. If you're not swapping heavily every day or doing something that writes a lot of data constantly I would't worry about it.

It is a real danger but it's extremely rare that someone might be writing so much data to an SSD constantly that this becomes an issue. It's like buying an SUV and then using it off-road when you actually needed a 4x4.

To be clear, this applies to any SSD not only internal Apple SSDs.
 
Pier said:
Those reports about the M1s were caused by an error in macOS.

Again, under normal circumstances, SSDs will outlive the device they are installed on. If you're not swapping heavily every day or doing something that writes a lot of data constantly I would't worry about it.

It is a real danger but it's extremely rare that someone might be writing so much data to an SSD constantly that this becomes an issue. It's like buying an SUV and then using it off-road when you actually needed a 4x4.

To be clear, this applies to any SSD not only internal Apple SSDs.
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For sure. Like I said, it's just not clear to me that this is anything other than a theoretical danger since I've never heard anyone, even anecdotally who actually encountered it. (But I've heard many express the concern.)
 
Pier said:
To be clear, this applies to any SSD not only internal Apple SSDs.
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Yeah, they are not Magic SSDs.

I think the SSD Wear concern could become a thing with a minimum-spec Air (8GB RAM/256GB SSD) that was swapping in and out of RAM/SSD constantly. And since external storage is easy to add, I'd err on the side of RAM vs SSD when specifying a new Mac.
 
HCMarkus said:
I think the SSD Wear concern could become a thing with a minimum-spec Air (8GB RAM/256GB SSD) that was swapping in and out of RAM/SSD constantly. And since external storage is easy to add, I'd err on the side of RAM vs SSD when specifying a new Mac.
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For sure! That's why I opted to max out the RAM (192GB) on my Mac Studio and to go with a somewhat smaller (2TB) SSD.
 
SSD wear on these new Macs wouldn't even be a concern if they would let us swap them out for a new one if/when the old one dies. But Apple will do Apple things.
 
newbreednet said:
SSD wear on these new Macs wouldn't even be a concern if they would let us swap them out for a new one if/when the old one dies. But Apple will do Apple things.
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At least on the Mac Studios, the SSDs are socketed. But this doesn't mean Apple is gonna sell you replacements for cheap.

Nick Batzdorf said:
They sure act like it!
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They are fast, but one reason is they run in some sort of RAID 0 array if the SSD compliment is more than one. As such, the relative speediness declines for small reads and writes when compared with non-RAIDed SSDs.
 
HCMarkus said:
At least on the Mac Studios, the SSDs are socketed. But this doesn't mean Apple is gonna sell you replacements for cheap.
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Oh wow, that's good, I was under the impression that the SSD - although socketed - was completely irreplaceable, but it seems that Apple will do it, though as you say not cheaply!
 
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