[rwha]

I have two laptops with SSDs running only Linux, and they both have mostly been powered on for two years or more (XFS and BTRFS). Both are still operating normally and smartctl shows minimal wear.

I would focus on mount options that limit writing (e.g., relatime/noatime) or putting ~/.cache on tmpfs.

In my experience ~/.cache gets the most frequent writing during normal desktop usage. A lot of applications ignore XDG standards and create their own snowflake folder directly in $HOME. You might want to watch for and replace those making a lot of writes with a symlink to where they belong. (This quickly became a frustrating battle that I lost).

[aruggirello]

Totally agree about using relatime/noatime mount options and using tmpfs wherever it's sensible. But if you want to take control of your $HOME, it probably makes sense to mount it separately. Putting ~/.cache on tmpfs will lose thousands of useful cache files every time you reboot (hitting performance, but also causing more reads eg. to larger original files), possibly consume gigabytes of memory, and should IMHO be avoided. Getting paranoid about disk wear on a 2yo laptop is perhaps a bit exaggerated.

Talking about desktop Linux, I (and my family) and workplace colleagues all run Kubuntu systems on SSD's continuously since 2012 - that's 8 years of continuous disk wear and counting. We're talking about 3 laptops and 5 desktops, several of them mdadm RAID0 (on 2-3 disks), all Ext4, and NO swap partitions (warning, this may lead to occasional crashes due to OOM situations, though that's going to improve soon hopefully). Three of these systems are heavy usage workstations, 5 of them have one or more VMs running, all of these systems are backed up to external USB2/3 disks via Timeshift [0] since 2012 (VM disk images are backed up separately). A few critical directories are shared via cloud, which thus also acts as a backup tool. All disks are periodically health checked via smartmontools. This in my experience maximizes performance (thanks to Ext4 and RAID0), while keeping stuff safe (thanks to backups). IMHO desktop systems don't need the kind of online redundancy provided by other RAID levels, and restoring a full system (including grub, on an mdadm system) from a Timeshift snapshot, which I did multiple times already, has always been a breeze.

Among the ~10 SSD corruption events I witnessed in this decade, I could track ~half down to a failing PSU or a bad SATA cable, though I had a couple disks abruptly die too (one NVME M.2 drive probably had thermal issues). Still, IMHO none was caused by wear.

relevant smartctl output for one of my desktop SSDs:

  9 Power_On_Hours_and_Msec 0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       12726h
  241 Host_Writes_32MiB       0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       623690
  249 NAND_Writes_1GiB        0x0032   100   100   000    Old_age   Always       -       23897

So, ~24 Tb written so far...

[0] https://teejeetech.in/

[Piskvorrr]

If they're always-on, reboots are rare...I keep a similar workstation on ext4 over RAID-1 (once bitten by bad disks, twice shy; I seem to have been hit by an abnormal number of submarine drives back in the day).

[znpy]

Funny story: almost three years ago I got a second hand thinkPad T440. It came with a 240GB ssd. A second hand laptop with an used ssd inside.

At the time I didn't have much money so I just kept the drive and decide to possibly face the issue.

I still use it, of course (it's my personal laptop).

Some days ago I switched to root and noticed a dead.letter file in root's home directory.

I examined the file and it was an email dropped into the home directory by smartd, alerting me that my hard drive was near failure.

The funny thing is, that email was from February 2018. More than two years since that email, that drive is still working.

[interfixus]

Well, well, I guess we are a movement then. I got a secondhand T440p three years ago, with a 240GB SSD. This machine is indestructible - it had already seen heavy use in an engineering company, and I really haven't spared it either. Running various permutations of Arch and Xfce all the way through. Last month, I finally did upgrade the SSD to a brand new Samsung EVO 1TB. The old unit (also a Samsung EVO, as it turned out) is doing just fine, though, but now running in a non-critical convenience setup.

I can't really sing enough praises for this ancient ThinkPad, now also with a new very cheap, ridiculously superb display and stuffed full of RAM. I have a newer, sleeker, faster Lenovo Something sitting around, but somehow the 440 is what I always end up using.

[Piskvorrr]

In my experience, SMART alerts you "that drive you can't access is probably failed"; rarely do you get an actual early warning.