Apple Previews macOS 13 Ventura - Available Fall 2022

[UtterDisbelief]

With the M1 Macs, Apple put the boot firmware on the internal SSD instead of in ROM, so once the internal drive dies, it won't boot any more, not even from an external drive.

This sounds quite serious, but as I understood the tech, once an SSD reaches Write EOL, the data on it can still be read, just no longer written to or over. If this remains true, even though your on-board SSD is no longer useful for storage or swap-filing, the Firmware should still be readable.

Is this not correct?

Or is the PRAM variable storage the issue?

 

[pastrychef]

up to 500GB/day

Wow!! That's insane!! Honestly, it's 2022. Apple really needs to make 16GB RAM the bare minimum on all Macs.

 

[craighazan]

I used DriveDX and smartctl from SmartMonTools.

I’m going to try these tools later, and see what my M1 SSD life expectancy is!.

 

[Superbogey]

It writes up to 500GB/day to the internal SSD, depending on how many photos I have to edit in LightRoom, or if I'm editing videos in FCP. Editing one photo can write 10GB, so editing 50 photos in a session can hit 500GB in a few hours.

With the M1 Macs, Apple put the boot firmware on the internal SSD instead of in ROM, so once the internal drive dies, it won't boot any more, not even from an external drive. You need a new logic board or a new Mac.

Yikes! Can you switch to limiting the internal drive for primarily booting and then get some variation of an external 2.5 HDD/SSD for use as a data drive (if you don't know already, there's a way to also copy your User Profile over to the external drive and then use a trick in the Users and Groups pref pane to select that as your default before deleting the original one on the boot drive. Although, you might want to keep a minimal profile on the boot drive in case of an emergency)? It's not going to fix your current situation but it might prolong your internal drive's lifespan.