Macs with the new M1 chip will likely suffer SSD problems causing them to die early

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Apple’s M1 Macs have been on sale for only a short while now, but some users have already reported troubling storage drive behavior that could mean the lifespan of those drives will be far less than expected.

That’s a big deal for any computer, but especially so for the Mac range, where the solid-state storage drives aren’t user-replaceable, as they are soldered onto the main circuit board of the Mac. If the drive statistics are to be believed, these drives won’t even last two years before hitting their Total Bytes Written (TBW), or the expected lifespan of the drive.

That’s worrying to me, as my 2015 MacBook Pro is still chugging along, over five years after purchase. If the M1 MacBook Pro I ordered has this drive fault, then it means the possibility of losing valuable data or dealing with expensive repairs.

That’s only if the drive stats are accurate, and perhaps the relative newness of the M1 platform is causing the drive utilities in macOS to misreport data written. It could also be a software bug, as at least one Twitter user has shown their Intel-based, 2016 MacBook Pro with abnormal data write statistics.

If it’s a software glitch, the best-case scenario is that the software is simply miscounting data transfers. A more worrying alternative is that macOS is writing unnecessary data to the drives, which would make the counters accurate and representative of the strain on the drives. No doubt Apple is working on a fix, either way, so we’ll keep you informed if we hear anything.

Have any thoughts on this? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.

Editors’ Recommendations:

• You can now run Linux on your M1-equipped Mac, kind of
• Microsoft 365 now has a version designed for new M1-equipped Macs
• A new MacBook report points to USB 4.0, full-sized HDMI, and more
• Apple crushed it over the holidays, shipping more smartphones than any other company

Joe Rice-Jones

Maker, meme-r, and unabashed geek with nearly half a decade of blogging experience at KnowTechie, SlashGear and XDA Developers. If it runs on electricity (or even if it doesn't), Joe probably has one around his office somewhere, with particular focus in gadgetry and handheld gaming. Shoot him an email at joe@knowtechie.com.