Can you reuse your old SSDs when building a brand new PC?

Now that the PC space is moving more and more towards SSDs, I'm wondering what the lifespan on such a storage device is.

Say I build a new PC in 4 years, can I just re-use my two 970 evo's in the new build?

I currently have my 860 in my current PC, which was used in my old PC to store the OS, and it's still running fine and dandy.

What is the age before an SSD starts failing?

Yes. If they aren't broken.

10 years or less, is what I've seen reported. Some of my friends have SSDs that are 5+ years old, no problems.

Seems like you are confirming what I suspected. I never used an HDD for more than 10 years anyway :)

Yes. I made the switch to SSD like 10+ years ago and have never looked back, never regretted it.

They're really good at being reused, and frankly since they have zero moving parts, are a much safer bet than HDD's imo. I can't confirm, but I'd wager that you see less performance loss over time as well.

Though you can always get two cheap HDD's and run them in RAID or whatever it's called if you're storing a lot of data you care about.

I think the oldest one in my PC is like 6+ years old.

Yes.

@mrbojangles25: My previous PC had a 256SSD and a 2TB and a 3TB HDD.

It was great because I could literally have hundreds of games installed and never had to look for 'Hmm, which game do I need to uninstall now so I can install a new one'. A luxury situation, I know, but that's what I wanted.

The transition to SSD was a bit rough. I sure was extremely happy with the speeds. Reduced loading times even in really old games, that aren't optimized for such speeds.

It's beneficial to however you chose to use your PC.

But so at the start I was running with a 1TB 970 evo and my old 256GB 860... I quickly ran into storage issues. But the main culprits were having RDR2 and COD MW 2019 installed at the same time.

I installed a second 970 evo (and have since moved on from COD and RDR) and never ran into an issue since.

I've reused and swapped them around in various computers. Don't think I have any younger than 5 at this point. Individual SSDs are rated for a certain number of read-write procedures, so that's probably the thing to research for the lifespan of yours, but my plan is to just keep using them until they get slow and start to throw faults when read/write. Then I'll migrate to a new ssd and keep rolling

Absolutely.

You can also use SMART to monitor the health of your drives to try and anticipate a failure, but they should last an extremely long time under normal use. 10+ years.

Having said that.... You should always maintain a few backups of important information. I keep all of my important files on a NAS with redundant storage, so if any of the drives die in my PC nothing is lost except a little bit of time.

Of course you can reuse them. Also, in regards to lifespan, it isn't so much about the age as it is the type of usage they go through. If you are doing a lot of production tasks that write to the SSD a lot, it will not last nearly as long as someone who does basic computer tasks and gaming on it. SSDs can only write so much data before they start to crap out. I wouldn't worry about it at all unless you are doing write heavy tasks frequently. I still have a 480GB Mushkin Chronos Deluxe that I bought many years ago and it is still going strong after being used in multiple builds.

My first SSD , 64gb, that I used as my main system drive, went 6.5 years before dying. But I use my PC heavily, and especially now since i am presently disabled :(

I have a program to check drive health and it says my 3 yo SSD is 70%, we'll see how long it lasts.

Still got my 2 old 120Gb SSDs installed, nowdays they're combined into one 250Gb drive.