We are digital librarians. Among us are represented the various reasons to keep data -- legal requirements, competitive requirements, uncertainty of permanence of cloud services, distaste for transmitting your data externally (e.g. government or corporate espionage), cultural and familial archivists, internet collapse preppers, and people who do it themselves so they're sure it's done right. Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep (either forever or For A Damn Long Time (tm) ). Along the way we have sought out like-minded individuals to exchange strategies, war stories, and cautionary tales of failures.
My 970 EVO 500G that I bought used with 2h of power on time, had about 400 power cycles.
Not really SMART related, but I'm currently using an 1TB Sandisk Extreme Pro that identifies as WD black SN750. Same hardware, but IDK how (and why) someone flashed the wd firmware on it.
I have a few 100gb SLC Hgst SAS SSDs that all have multiple petabytes written on them. Apparently the worst one only has 96% life remaining and only ~37 power on hours.
Came out of an EMC VNX or some other EMC product.
I have a drive that was decomissioned, presumably, due to 2 errors during long smart tests (within 2k hours, at roughly 30k). Other than that it has perfect SMART parameters, surface tests without issue, and has been running for a year 24/7 no problem now. Other than excessive vibration or a power issue I have no idea what could have caused that.
Wear and tear?
I'd expect that to be permanent.