Buying a used SSD . . .

Samsung 860 Evo

What would you test it with other than Samsung Magician and CrystalDiskInfo?

Use hard disk essential to scan bad blocks (sectors).

You have no idea how many read/write cycles it's been through. Spend the extra money for a new one.

With hard Disk Sentinel or CrystalDiskInfo:

Check the SMART parameters, and the "Lifetime Writes" parameter.

Compare the latter with the TBW specification for the SSD. If it is 20% or greater, I wouldn´t buy.

Anibor_11 said:

Compare the latter with the TBW specification for the SSD. If it is 20% or greater, I wouldn´t buy.

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Agree. It also depends on role. If you will use it as a system drive, need max possible resource left, I wouldn't buy less than 80%. If it will be an internal drive for archive data or an external SSD in suitable enclosure, remained resource may be less.

I'm just buying it to test drive Linux Mint . . . it won't get much use but I do expect it to be a good drive or I can return it. They said they were all tested and the ebay user has over 11K reviews and 100% positive and sometimes you get lucky. at 1/3 the price of new I'm hoping to get lucky. I dont really NEED a new drive.

john1955 said:

They said they were all tested .... ebay .... sometimes you get lucky

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Why do I hear alarm bells ..... ?

My drive is still in the mail but I tested CrystalDiskInfo and Hard Disk Sentinel and I like Hard Disk Sentinel more because it gives a better explanation. Maybe I should say it gives SOME explanation where with CrystalDiskInfo I had to Google everything to figure out what it meant. The only drive that gave me pause was my internal backup drive that has one bad sector and runs warm (47º) and it has over 9 years of up time on it so I need to replace that one some time soon.

I bought 2 corsair 120GB ssd's a few years back, both second hand, and they have been used daily in my test machines as boot drives, one drive shows health at 100%, and the other at 98% in CrystalDiskInfo, so you can get lucky. Odd how my new Samsung drive dropped to 98% in a few weeks.

PurSpyk!! said:

I bought 2 corsair 120GB ssd's a few years back, both second hand, and they have been used daily in my test machines as boot drives, one drive shows health at 100%, and the other at 98% in CrystalDiskInfo, so you can get lucky. Odd how my new Samsung drive dropped to 98% in a few weeks.

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98% health on SSD is not that rare. The disk is still healthy but not in "mint condition". Nothing to worry about, unless you see less than 96%. Also less than 100% in performance usually means that the disk is not optimized, or is connected to a slower port (SATA III disk on SATA II port). I would buy a used SSD for secondary computers, such as my laptop. For my main PC I use every day I would prefer a new disk.

I find Hard Disk Sentinel to be an excellent application. It's great at forewarning you of impending drive failures.

The benefit of knowing your drive(s) is failing is simple. You can easily clone and replace it before it dies completely.

Firstly, few people understand what a health of say 80% means as shown in some of the replies here

It DOES NOT mean 20% of life of drive has been used OR 20% is no longer usuable.

It means the drive has only used 20% of the vendors "quoted" write endurance. However here is the basic "scam". The vendors set a deliberately low write endurance (as low as 33% of true endurance) so they never have to pay out on a warranty if drive fails to "excessive" writes.

It's a bit like car warranties where a car is guranteed for 60000 miles but car has done 90000 miles in guarantee period and then fails. If guarantee was 100000 miles, car vendor would have to pay out.
So the guaranteed mileage is set artificially low.


So, even if drive, gets to 100% of vendor quoted endurance, drive can still go on a lot longer.

So on the face of it, you might think buying a second hand drive realistically still has plenty of life.

However that is only part of the story. The drive has electronic components to interface with pc via drive cable.

Problem here is the electronics is more likely to fail rather than dying by excessivr writing.

Electronics failure rates are a function of all sorts of parameters e.g. temperature, humidity, number of on/off cycles etc.

Again it's a bit like cars, Cars can be mileage but parts can fail due to old age more than by wear and tear (classic being older style cam belts which naturally deteriorated over time).

The problem with electronic failures in an ssd is you cannot test or predict such failures. Statistical analyses typical show a low rate of failure at start of life, with rates increasing (and accelerating) over time.

Unfortunately some drives will fail early and some will last for ages BUT you have no way of knowing. The only thing you can say with reasonable certainty is a an old drive is statistically more likely to fail from failed electronics more than a new one.

So in simple terms, always buy a new one but plain for it to fail early by having critical data (as a minimum) backed up.

Do not buy second hand drive (unless say still quite new e.g. 2 years or less and fairly cheap). Point is there is a trade off with cost

Of course, if you choose to still go ahead, it is even more critical to backup key data.

I would only consider secondhand drives if savings were say less than 40% of cost new.

As you could be getting over 66% saving, the financial risk is lower but the likelihood of failure is higher, so it is ultimately a "pay yer money, make your choice" decision.

The point is decision is really a "risk vs reward" decision.

In the end, as Dirty Harry would say "Did I use 5 or 6 bullets - how lucky do you feel?".


Of courses, backup is essential (but same is true even for new drives).

In simple words, buy it for testing, as you intend doing, but avoid a used drive for your main disk or backup you don't want to lose.

spapakons said:

In simple words, buy it for testing, as you intend doing, but avoid a used drive for your main disk or backup you don't want to lose.

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Exactly . . . I'm buying it for farting around . . . would never put any real work files on it.

But one good thing has already come of this, I never used Hard Disk Sentinel or CrystalDiskInfo on any of my drives before and because I was trying those apps I discovered I might want to start thinking of replacing two of my important drives . . . one of my backup HDD and one of my SSD's are getting long in the tooth. The internal HDD has been on 24/7 for just under 10 years. Dang! Time flies.

This new USED SSD's status is "perfect" and it's health is %100 with only 5 days 20 hrs of power on time and 824GB of lifetime writes which is a fraction of any of my 4 other Samsung SSD's that have 1000's of days on them And they did not charge me for it till after it was delivered by USPS. It was also wiped and "sanitized" (NIST 800-88 R1 Clear) so I'm happy with the purchase.

john1955 said:

This new USED SSD's status is "perfect" and it's health is %100

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I know I'm a bit late coming here but I just read your thread and noticed that the forum tutorial had not been mentioned.
Check Drive Health and SMART Status - ElevenForunTutorials
You might also find the parameter definitions in this to be of some use -
Common SMART Attributes - Intel


All the best,
Denis