HACKER Q&A
📣 salusinarduis

Has anyone's M1/M2 SSDs failed?


I'm currently writing about 1.5 TB a day doing research and software engineering tasks. I'm considering buying a NVME enclosure and running the OS completely off that and not using the internal disk. It's a Mac Mini so the 10w draw of the enclosure isn't the end of the world.

Curious to hear if it's a real concern or if I should not worry.

  👤 richardjam73 Accepted Answer ✓
I've lost 2 M2 drives the first was 2TB Samsung 970 Evo which exceeded it's write endurance limit. Either due to firmware or me writing too much I'm not sure. The other M2 was a smaller Gigabyte drive that had some hardware failure.

My new drive is a 1TB Samsung 980 Pro which has a write endurance of 600TBW so if I wrote 1.5TB a day it would last just over a year. I don't know how much endurance the drive in a Mac Mini has but I can't imagine it is any better than that. I would not want to write so much per day to the systems internal drive if it is not easily and cheaply replacable.

👤 navjack27
Nope. My Mac mini m1 with the smallest drive that I bought the month they came out that I use every day is perfectly fine.

If you mean ssds in general? I've never had a single one fail on me. My nas is all solid state with 4 sata ssds and 4 nvme m.2 drives as a big ol btrfs jbod and it's reliable as heck.

My desktop has been solid state only. Nvme only for a couple years now.

The only drives I've ever had fail were Western digital red NAS drives. I got 8tb of broken disks because rotating rust is horrible.