I'm building a PC for a friend using some older parts, including a Samsung SSD 850 EVO that has been in service for roughly eight or nine years. Its health is reported as 98%, with about 186,511 GB read, 19,729 GB written, 1,532 power-on cycles, and 6,928 hours of use. It would only be used as a secondary drive for installing games, so there wouldn't be any irreplaceable files on it. Would using it daily for gaming likely be reasonable for another three or four years, or would I be setting my friend up for avoidable trouble if the drive eventually failed?
4 Answers
Use it, but make the setup easy to recover from. Keep anything important somewhere else and make sure the game library can be re-downloaded or restored if the SSD dies. Since your friend may have difficulty replacing hardware, checking the drive occasionally and having a spare or replacement plan would be sensible.
Those usage figures are pretty modest for an SSD of this model. Many 850 EVO drives have continued working reliably after a decade or more, so I wouldn’t be concerned about using it for games. Just remember that SMART health percentages and endurance ratings aren’t guarantees, so a failure is still possible.
A drive can fail unexpectedly even with a good health report, so I wouldn’t use it for personal files or anything that can’t be replaced. For secondary game storage, though, the risk is relatively low and the drive’s recorded writes are well below its rated endurance.
It should be perfectly reasonable for game storage. Depending on the capacity, the 850 EVO is rated for roughly 75–300 TB written, and this drive has only recorded about 19.7 TB of writes. Its age and power-on time don’t automatically make it unsafe, especially since the health reading is still strong. No drive is guaranteed, but I wouldn’t expect its age alone to be a reason to replace it.
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