If you have a new Mac, you probably think it will last for years and years, but some new and worrying data suggests that may not be the case. Many users are reporting that SSDs on the new M1 and Intel Macs are possibly being overused by the system, which can cause them to wear out earlier than normal.
Twitter User @never_released started a topic that shows a report from a Mac M1 with very high recording counts to a computer just two months old. This prompted other M1 owners to run the same report, and many also found overuse, including the Macworld columnist. Dan Moren.
Twitter 
Twitter In Moren’s comparison, his 2017 iMac records about 2.15 terabytes of data recorded each month for 14 percent of its life cycle, while the new M1 MacBook records nearly 6 TB and has lost 1 percent if its expected useful life . This may not seem like much, but if you extrapolate over the same period of time, the MacBook’s SSD can be 30 to 40 percent used in the same period of time. Moren’s machine has 16 GB of RAM, so usage could be even greater for machines with 8 GB of RAM.
Other users have reported that Macs with Intel processors are behaving strangely, with a user’s report an astonishing 33 percent used after just 7 months.
SSDs are preferred over traditional hard drives because they are much faster, but SSDs have a limited life. An SSD wears out every time you write to it, and eventually the drive will have problems and probably need to be replaced. However, this should take several years to happen, and macOS spreads the writing on an SSD to extend its lifespan. Based on these readings, this can happen much earlier than expected.
To see disk usage, you can download DriveDx, which offers a 2-week free trial. More advanced users can explore the health of their unit using smartmon and Terminal tools.
There may be an error in the reporting tool, but macOS is more likely to be doing something to the SSD to cause these spikes. In this case, it is worrying because the SSD drives on most new Macs cannot be repaired by the user and cost hundreds of dollars to replace. Anyway, this is clearly a software issue that can be fixed with a future update of macOS, but it is not yet known whether it is a failure or a feature.
We contacted Apple for comment and will update this story if we hear back.
Update 2/24: Added more information about the problem and how to check the SSD usage on your Mac.