Technology

I have a pile of spinning disks that were online for less than ten years under low usage load that failed. I have bins and bins full of them at work with enterprise drives too.

I have personally had a single ssd fail in 15 years, it was an SX6000 that died from controller issues. My first ones were 64GB ones back in the infancy of SSDs. The controllers have come a long way and speeds are now 10-100x faster and much more reliable. Never, ever had one go bad from TBW personally or professionally. I've never even met someone who has gotten that to happen, the controllers usually go long before the NAND.

12 years is still beyond the lifetime of a typical computer. Even if you do not have component failures you start spending more money on power to run these things than it would cost to replace them with faster, larger capacity newer systems that use less energy for more oompf. Only people with free or nearly free power are immune to this which is not common.

I'm not saying just throw out all the old systems though, but most people aren't gonna limp along on a 12 year old system as their daily driver. It might be ok for basic web browsing, word processing and email... but not much more than that. If it's a laptop it's gonna be dog slow.