Trilarion: Good questions. I would like to add that I wonder what is the actual life expectancy of an SSD now?
It may depend on usage or manufacturing process.
Well, yeah, it does depend on the usage, that's pretty much the thing that's been known since the SSDs became a thing and apparently you can fill an entire SSD roughly 150 times before it is at serious risk of dying on you.
How long they work if barely used or how long they can hold data while being unpowered seems to be a rather controversial issue at this point. I saw an article that suggests that manufacturers do expect SSDs to lose data if unpowered for too long but there only seem to be rough estimates so far. They don't seem to be relevant to everyday users, though.
I have literally no idea, though, how long an SSD will work if use it regularly but not intensely in terms of writing operations. That's the biggest mystery about them, it seems.
Trilarion: I think I remember there was a tool being able to readout hard discs and their failure management and the more failures you had the closer your hard disc was towards being dead.
Yes but - from what I understand - the problem with SSDs is that there's a tiny time frame between the first failures occurring and the whole drive dying down and that's exactly what's so scary about them compared to HDDs which tend to show their "fatigue" early enough to comfortably backup the data and replace the drive (although I myself once had an HDD die abruptly on me due to a head crash so I'm not saying that it's a rule).
SSD health is generally measured in the number of writing operations that have been performed on them in total (their firmware seems to keep track of that) and that alone seems to be enough to have a fair idea when you should replace an SSD.
