Killed my old MacBook Pro. Any recommendations to help extend the life of my M1 Macook Air internal SSD?

Solution 1:

Am I overthinking this?

Yes.

Mechanical 'spinning rust' hard drives have a typical lifespan of less than 5 years. Excessive work could shorten that.
(You could replace the hard drive in your 2012 MBP with an SSD (get a SATA 2.5" type), and you would notice a considerable improvement in the speed of the Mac.)

The myth of needing to guard precious writes on SSDs stems largely from old technology when SSDs first became 'mainstream' c. 10 years ago. Most SSDs now have lifespans that exceed the useful life of the device they are inside.

Estimates for the lifespan of Apple's M1 SSDs (256 GB) are at least 300 TB of writes (though could be significantly higher), so if my maths is correct, you've got over 8 years of 100GB per day.

One caveat is that it's not clear whether M1 Macs can function if the on-chip storage fails.

Also, re your 'backup drive': remember that a backup is a second copy. You should always be prepared for any storage device to suddenly stop working, by having another device with the same files on it.