Hardware: MacBook Air, 8 gigabytes of RAM, M1 CPU. Host OS - MacOS Monterey, Guest OS - Windows 11 for ARM. I have been using Parallels Desktop for less than three months, yet the total bytes written value of SSD has already exceeded its first terabyte. I am worried about SSD breaking down early if this continues. I have been in contact with support for over a month, and partially they were helpful. When I was advised to increase guest OS RAM to 6 gigabytes and disable the TRIM feature, there were less writes. Still, however, a full day of work somehow results in about 10 gigabytes written. It appears that the main culprit here is the Microsoft's compiler, as when virtual machine is idle it does not seem to write that much on the SSD. Whenever I compile software the kernel_task and launchd of host OS start writing something to SSD (I am checking this via Activity Monitor). I do not run any other software besides Qt Creator and MSVC compiler in guest OS. On host the only program that I start is Parallels Desktop itself. I have tried creating a RAM disk, changing TMP, TEMP environment variables to point there, moved project files and compiled the project from there, yet somehow it still triggered lots of writes to the SSD. This is quite puzzling: RAM disk is supposed to eliminate any writes to SSD, and there is still enough RAM available for both guest and host OSes (both always report that at least 1 gigabyte is free), so it is not supposed to start using the virtual memory either, right?
