What mitigation steps are you taking for when your SSD dies a horrible death? Do you keep all your important files saved on another SSD or in the cloud? And you'll just buy a new SSD and re-image? Or are you doing something else?
There's probably some truth to SSDs dying off horribly, but like anything else, the tech will evolve and then you replace your SSD with a new SSD at some point. Wouldn't hurt to use Time Machine as well.
I must be remarkable lucky. I have seven SSDs, four of them are installed in computers I use often, and some more in datacenter servers. I have never had a failure. And the SSD that's in my home unix server is already doing its job for almost two years now.
I do make regular (image) backups from all my SSDs, so when one fails I can quickly replace it and restore the image. Apart from that I keep all my sourcecode and work-related stuff in a source code versioning control system hosted in a datacenter.
My SSD died. Much like a USB drive, when it died, I could still read from it. Just made a direct ghost of it onto another SSD. Was up and running in less than 15 minutes.
I used to develop SSD firmware. Remember that these things need to handle power loss at any point in time. We store lots of redundant copies of information on the NAND so its just a matter of running the code that rebuilds everything.
AFAIK, SSDs usually give one warning before dying, and that's suddenly becoming irreversibly read only. They might not always survive a reboot (which certainly would be the first thing I'd do if my OS suddenly reported a drive as RO) but you usually do have a time window to get your data off safely.
An SSD randomly giving the ghost is one of my greatest fears when it comes to desktop computers, because there's no way to get any data off them when they die. With spinning rust you can usually send the drive to an expensive data recovery company who will likely transplant the platters and send you a copy of what's on disk, but if a flash chip is slightly damaged because of a short or whatever, you won't have such luck.
Yes, I know, I should make more backups, but every time I thought I'd gotten everything safely backed up, I found a file or folder that I forgot to include.
because not losing data is infinitely better than saving your ssd life a couple years. we've had ssds for a long time now. still waiting for one to die on me. meanwhile I'm on my 27th dead spinning disk.
I just don't keep anything important on my SSD. My desktop's SSD is for Windows and games. All documents and other stuff goes on my mechanical drives and my AppData folder is backed up every night too. Everything on my laptop's SSD is either in cloud storage or in an external git repo. I'm 100% prepared for the certain eventuality of any of these SSDs going tits up unexpectedly and catastrophically.
I'm more worried about everybody else who gets an SSD and doesn't take the right precautions, because everybody sells SSDs as being so much more reliable than mechanical drives.
I worked as a PC technician for a while recently. Of the handful of catastrophic failures of mechanical drives we had, the majority of those were ones that were physically dropped, resulting in a head crash. Otherwise, we generally always managed to save data from failing drives. Any failing SSD we encountered was just dead, since there are really only two states: Fine or failed. There was nothing we could do except refer them to a data recovery company that charges thousands of Euros.
I think having a backup solution is the better choice here. You can use your SSDs until they die or become too slow, and you won't lose your data if it breaks before you replace it after a year
Literally 99% of laptops out there die and/or are recycled with the stock configuration.
The first thing to go are the ports, batteries, screens, keyboards. I haven't seen an SSD failure in a decade now and we have thousands of them in production and on people's laptops.
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