Tablets equipped with the Apple MacBook Neo keyboard only come with 8 GB of combined RAM, running the risk of accelerated storage degradation. Due to the small amount of RAM, the operating system is forced to constantly flush data to the page file, placing an unusually high load on the built-in SSD.
YouTube channel UFD Tech conducted a stress test and lifespan assessment of the MacBook Neo hard drive. The 256 GB version has an estimated resource coverage of approximately 414 TB (approximately 5% disk drive health loss after writing 20 TB), while the 512 GB version has a design capacity of approximately 1521 TB.
During everyday office browsing scenarios (Google Chrome, reading articles, chatting on Discord), the laptop wrote nearly 900 GB of data to the page file in just 3 hours of operation.
When used continuously as a primary work machine with similar background loads, a base 256 GB drive could theoretically exhaust its guaranteed write life in just 1400 hours of active use (about 58 days). For the 512 GB model, this number is approximately 5,000 hours.
It’s important to note that the TBW metric is not a guaranteed resource, after which the flash die dies, and actual wear and tear depends heavily on usage, but this is exacerbated by the fact that the drives in the MacBook Neo are soldered to the motherboard. If the storage unit is physically worn out, replacing the disk will require complex and expensive component repairs to the motherboard and risk permanent data loss.
