I bought a few of these used Samsung 960gb solid state drives. After testing, it seems that they were used in a professional environment due the high power on time but low power on count.
They all showed up with 163 days estimated remaining lifetime despite the pretty good health and performances levels. I've been using one of them for a month now and it did go down to 144 days as you can see in the screenshot.
My question is what's gonna happen when the timer hits 0 ?
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No need to worry, It will not hit 0 (at least not in a short time).
And if it would decrease or drop further - it does not mean the SSD will surely fail.
In general, the estimated remaining lifetime is calculated based on the
- actual power on time of the drive (how long it was working)
- actual Health % of the drive
It is an indicator to suggest when it is recommended to replace in a mission critical environment (eg. server). Probably this is why the drive sold/replaced.
For non-critical data (and/or if you have regular backups) you can continue using the SSD, hopefully for many years.
The "estimated remaining lifetime" is not a strict countdown, in some weeks it will stop decreasing, until the Health % will drop further.
Maybe below 50% Health I'd consider replacement but this is still far from now....
?