Used SSDs

[triniP]

What should the state of the ssd's health be in when considering buying used ssd? Like how many GBs written / read? Or power on hours / power on counts?

 

Thanks in advance.

[The Sloth]

yes, nand has a certain amount of times it can be written and read, make sure its not too old. 

[tp95112]

Ask what the drive was used and do research on when the drive was released to the market. A drive from 2010 or something might not be the safest drive 

[Guest]

I'm sorry, but this might sound like a cop out but... It depends on the drive. 

 

You'll need to do some work to see what is normal usage for each model of SSD. As far as I am aware, SSD's don't usually fail because of power on hours or writes (under consumer workloads) but due to age. One thing to note is that you will need to check if the drive model has had any issues of significance with your drive type. I.e. Samsung 840 EVO's had a data aging issue that has since been fixed with firmware, but that doesn't mean the previous owner has updated it so you'd need to check).

As far as data written it can run in to the TB easily (mine has written 30TB! but is barely a quarter of the way to it's rated data written). Luckily there is one metric you can easily check, lookup the SSD model number and the manufacturer will have a TBW statistic. If the SSD you're looking at is less than that you're off to a good start.

Power on counts are utterly useless for a SSD, as there is no drive spindle to put load on, it's a metric that has implications for spinning HDD"s. That's a metric that's interesting to look at, but not really relevant to an SSD.

Stick to known large brands and models, and do your homework about the drive model, when buying secondhand and pick them up off known good sources (manufacturer refurb, friends etc), do your homework and you'll get a good one.

[EunSoo]

I usually avoid buying a used SSD in general. As far as GBs written/read and how much is too much to buy, it really depends on what brand SSD it is and how much it is being sold to make it worth it. However, modern SSDs can take as much as a petabyte before they die, but again, it depends on the model

[JoostinOnline]

Things I would recommend buying used (if you can't afford new):

• Motherboards
• CPU's
• RAM
• Cases
• Optical drives
• CPU coolers
• GPU's

Things to always buy new:

• Any kind of storage
• PSU's