Hope this helps anyone who seems to be having an issue with SSD writes with the M1 Macs. Status of the disk information overview in Disk Utility. Select the disk from the list at the left of the Disk Utility screen (select the actual main disk, not a partition). If you are affected with high SSD writes, I suggest tracking down any long-running Rosetta 2 apps or services and disabling and see if that makes a difference. Here’s how it works: Open Disk Utility on the Mac, Disk Utility is found in the /Applications/Utilities/ folder. Either way, I'm happy to see that my SSD write figure is now in the much more acceptable range. Unfortunately issues with SMART reporting have been around since the beginning since drive manufacturers dont always provide the necessary information to properly interpret the real values. So it could be Rosetta 2 that causes high swap usage that leads to high SSD writes, or it could be the Electron/Chromium-based apps that seem to just be memory hogs. So I tried uninstalling these apps, instead opting for web-based clients running in Safari since a couple of days ago and guess what.only 40GB SSD writes per day.
Drivedx mac can not read smart nvme software#
According to, these apps are currently NOT native M1 apps and being a software developer, I also knew that they are built on Electron/Chromium which can be memory hogs. Mac users can easily check the SMART status of their hard drives and internal disk storage by using Disk Utility in Mac OS, offering a simple way to see if the disk hardware itself is in good health or is experiencing a hardware issue. Then I realized that some of the long-running apps running on Rosetta 2 were hogging quite a bit of memory, namely WhatsApp desktop and Discord desktop clients. This was reported all over the tech news by now and like many have noticed, it's the kernel_task process relating to high swap usage that's writing rather astonishing amount of data (90 ~ 120GB per day for me according to Activity Monitor). As I do with any new Macs, I monitor several system statistics for the first couple of weeks and I found that writes to SSD was way too high (100 ~ 150GB per day easily on 3 - 4 hour usage). I am a long time Mac user who recently purchased the new M1 Macbook Air with 8GB memory + 512GB SSD.
Drivedx mac can not read smart nvme pro#
I purchased a Thunderbolt 3 external SSD from Other World Computing, the 1 TB model of the Envoy Pro EX, for just under 300, which is rated at 2800 MBps. Try tracking down and disabling or uninstalling long-running Rosetta 2 apps and/or services. SSDs these days rely on NVM Express, a standard built on top of PCI Express, which can offer up to 10 times the rate, challenging the top rates offered by Thunderbolt 3. TL DR - Rosetta 2 apps may be causing high swap usage therefore high SSD writes via kernel_task process.