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   Gabriele Svelto (gabrielesvelto@mas.to)'s status on Monday, 21-Sep-2026 22:44:22 JST Gabriele Svelto

   This is completely unsurprising and it's not a problem with the Neo alone. Any Windows machine with a small SSD has the same problem, and it boils down to two things: swap and log-like writes. The former issue is being exacerbated by poor coding and high resource usage, but the latter is really an effect of how applications are being developed. With a lot of apps being basically a browser in disguise the amount of stuff that gets logged to disk via sqlite or similar libraries is becoming ridiculous. Vibe-coding is turbo-charging these trends by making applications even more resource intensive and even more inclined to use structured and inefficient storage.

   https://www.techpowerup.com/352178/macbook-neo-burns-through-ssd-cycles-at-an-alarming-rate

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     Gabriele Svelto (gabrielesvelto@mas.to)'s status on Monday, 21-Sep-2026 22:44:15 JST Gabriele Svelto

     in reply to

     BTW, when SSD drives exhaust their write endurance they don't just cease to work, they can still be used but they're frozen in read-only mode. So keep a backup of the keys used for encryption (BitLocker in particular) as the keys kept in the TPM will become suddenly unusable. Without a recovery key you won't be able to access the data on the disk. And get the data out of it ASAP as flash contents can degrade in a matter of months, especially on an SSD that reached the end of its life.

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     Gabriele Svelto (gabrielesvelto@mas.to)'s status on Monday, 21-Sep-2026 22:44:18 JST Gabriele Svelto

     in reply to

     For some anecdotal evidence I've seen this problem even on machines with 512 GB drives. In particular I encountered a four year old Windows machine with a 512 GB QLC drive that had already burned through 40% of the flash write endurance. That's a lot for something used for regular browsing/e-mail/office work. This machine had 8 GiB of RAM so it's possible that swap made it worse. Either way, it seems we went from SSD endurance a solved problem to it becoming a potentially major source of failures.

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     Gabriele Svelto (gabrielesvelto@mas.to)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Sep-2026 01:44:09 JST Gabriele Svelto

     in reply to

     It's worth adding that this is a much bigger problem on small QLC drives and to a lesser extent TLC ones. Old MLC/SLC drives are largely unaffected. I have a 13 year old Intel S3500 600 GB MLC drive which accumulated 50 terabytes of writes and it still reports 100% of its write endurance and no spare flash used.

     The problem with multi-level flash is that each generation doubles the number of bits per cell, halving the signal-to-noise-ratio. So it becomes exponentially harder to reliably read and write bits from them, and thus endurance suffers significantly.

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     Infoseepage (infoseepage@mastodon.social)'s status on Tuesday, 22-Sep-2026 03:58:54 JST Infoseepage

     in reply to

     @gabrielesvelto The big problem is most of these folks never write down the key or have it stored in their account and while I strongly try to push users having USB backup drives with at least occasional full disc snapshots, there are some users that just can't learn even when they've been burned repeatedly.