GENIUS TIPS

Am I wearing out my M1 Mac’s SSD?

- HOWARD OAKLEY

Q I love Skyrim on my year-old M1 MacBook Pro, but I'm worried it might be wearing out its 1TB internal SSD, which is already down to 99% left. Should I install it on an external SSD?

by RYAN SHARPE

A Standard forecasts of the working life of SSDs are based on the limited number of times that each block of memory can be written to. When the remaining life of your Mac's internal SSD falls much below 50%, then its failure becomes increasingly likely, although like all electronics there's a remote chance that could happen at any time.

In its first year, your Mac has only used 1% of its expected life. Even if it were to use twice that, you could expect it to be good for another 25 years or more, by which time most SSDs are likely to have died of old age.

A fast Thunderbolt 3 SSD would only deliver half the performance of the internal SSD, and could only reduce wear on the internal. That's because most temporary files and caches, responsible for many writes to disk, would still occur on internal storage.

Some files, like virtual machines and huge databases, can save wear when stored on external disks, as they're very large and change often. In general, though, you're better off using your Mac's internal SSD: after all that's why we pay so much for it.