It all started with this tweet:

People with an M1 mac, please run `brew install smartmontools && sudo smartctl –all /dev/disk0` and report back (and what kind of usage you make of the machine, especially RAM).

I'm at <600GBW on my MBP, but I don't use it heavily. https://t.co/LbhE9p7FiK

— Hector Martin (@marcan42) February 15, 2021

Took about 10 days to reach critical mass, but then off to the races, with headlines like:

Apple M1 Macs appear to be chewing through their SSDs

And:

Apple M1 Mac users face severe SSD degradation

Back to the SSDs:

In a follow-on tweet in the same thread (also 10 days ago):

Just to be clear: This is definitely a bug. It’s software. It’s macOS behavior. It can be fixed.

Folks have reported encountering the problem on Intel Macs as well. So clearly not an M1-specific issue. To me, feels more like a Big Sur issue. And it might be an issue with the reporting system, not with the SSD. Big grain of salt required.

Worth surfacing, for sure. Hopefully, Apple can address this, offer up an explanation and a patch, if required.