Used enterprise SSDs: a one-year field report

Last winter I replaced my NAS spinning mirror's cache tier with six used enterprise SSDs bought from decommissioned servers. Total cost was less than one new consumer drive. A year on, here is the data.

Wear: the drives came with 8-14% life used. After a year of my workload they each moved less than one additional percent. For a home write pattern, these drives are effectively immortal.

The gotchas are real, though. Power-loss protection means they flush aggressively; my idle power went up about 4W in total. Some units arrive with a vendor-specific block size, and reformatting 4K-native drives took a Saturday morning.

smartctl -A /dev/sdb | grep -E "Percentage|Remaining"

Would I do it again: yes, for cache and scratch tiers. For the irreplaceable archive tier I still prefer new drives with a warranty, because a dead SSD is silent and instant in a way a dying HDD is not.