Isn’t the problem with this, that they work till they fail. You can run some software that can tell you how dead the drive is, but you can’t figure how likely it will die. Some drives I think have some stats you can access, but generally you can’t tell until it fails.
There used to be a great site before that was a data center publishing physical hdd stats, not looked for it for a long time, but I presume they would have ssd stats these days too.
I think you're right about working until they fail but I've only ever had anecdotal evidence to this effect.
I also reckon much of the problem comes from the fact that information about them is proprietary—simply manufacturerers just don't tell us much about them as to do so may reveal trade secrets. Several decades ago I was involved in work where we had to have as large storage as possible irrespective of cost, back then a 1GB SanDisk was worth somewhere between $1k and $2k (we replaced single-sep time lapse remote monitoring film cameras with TV and needed large storage).
We approached SanDisk (about the only manufacturer with such large drives at the time) and they were very reticent about telling us anything worthwhile—even though we were a large international organization and had clout. We needed to know the reliability so we had to investigate it ourselves, whilst we made some progress it was never fully satisfactory.
Anecdotal info we learned from various sources was that manufacturerers had ways of testing them by altering the threshold voltage—the point where the gate potential would switch from 0 to 1. At a critical point one could check how many gates failed to switch and this voltage altered over time/with use. Monitoring this could provide useful info such as knowing when to retire a device before it failed.
How accurate this info is I don't know but it seems to make sense. If true, we users should be demanding of manufacturerers utilities that are capable of doing such testing. Trouble is, manufacturerers continue to maintain this secrecy.
PS: several days ago I put a brand new SanDisk 128GB in one of my PVRs and it's really hot to touch even when it's on standby (not recording TV). This isn't the first time I've noticed how hot they get. This isn't the PVR's fault as I've several different brands and the thumb drive gets very hot in each one including my PC. One wonders what this elevated temperature does to the reliability/service life.
There used to be a great site before that was a data center publishing physical hdd stats, not looked for it for a long time, but I presume they would have ssd stats these days too.