This could be a bit of a warning sign for some M1 Mac users.
A number of M1 Mac owners have begun to highlight hard drive health reports that could potentially indicate life span issues for the solid state drives within their machines. iMore offered the following comments:
The issue of ‘TBW’, or total bytes written, refers to the lifespan of an SSD… If the readings being given out from these machines is correct, developer Hector Martin says it could indicate that some machines “aren’t going to last half a year”… Martin does however state this is “definitely” a bug, however its unclear if that relates to the readings being given, or macOS behavior which is causing the readings to be abnormally high (but accurate). As PC Gamer notes in its report, smart monitoring tools “are notorious for misreporting” and this could be an M1 teething problem.
It’s unknown as to exactly what’s causing this, and if the issue could be an inaccurate report, something that could be fixed with a firmware update, or something else.
Please let us know if you’ve seen anything like this on your end in the comments.
Via The Mac Observer, iMore, and PC Gamer