Virtual machines and Docker containers can eat up memory, so maybe macOS was just running out of memory and writing to the page file.

He also says that he occasionally uses Parallels Desktop and Docker. According to David, the Twitter user quoted above, his use is 'heavy', including multiple browser windows and communications apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Discord. It's also reading very little data from the disk more than once, as the system reports only 159 TB read. SMART tools via the command line on macOS Big Sur showed a big surpriseġ50 TB written in two months works out to 2.5 TB per day, or 104 GB per hour, which works out to 28.8 MB per second. One user reported that his Mac mini with a 1 TB SSD and 16 GB of memory was writing to the drive at a frightening pace. So on top of installing apps, writing documents, and caching files, Macs under heavy use could also be writing a lot to a swap file. Hector Martin, one of the developers responsible for porting the Linux kernel to Apple Silicon M1 processors, asked the question on Twitter: how much writing has the SSD in your Apple M1 Mac done? The early M1 systems all shipped with just 8 GB of RAM out of the box, and could only be upgraded to 16 GB at the time of purchase. That's why it might be a good idea to keep track of whether a system with built-in storage is wearing itself down. And as flash density increases by storing more bits per cell (for example, Samsung's QVO drives with QLC NAND), its longevity decreases, since it can't handle as many write operations. The issue with highly-integrated motherboards with onboard storage is that if the onboard SSD wears out, the whole system becomes a brick of e-waste. Apple's latest M1 Macs - and many Intel-based ones, for that matter - all use the company's T2 security chip, which encrypts the system's built-in storage.

M1 mac mini ssd upgrade