"The ones in my older (Win7) systems (180GB Intel SATA SSDs) have been chugging along for close to 10 years now without issue. However..."
However is right, since the SMART data is pretty useless for several reasons judgement day never comes, it's simply sudden death. Obviously this is where current backups come into play. If I were in your shoes I'd sweat out the 10 year mark, then replace them since these days SSDs that capacity are cheap enough. Then I'd have the old ones gold plated, one I'd put on display, the others each donated to a vintage computer museum. That would spread them around rather than one going on display and the rest trashed.
In days past I've had good luck with WD HDDs, not so with Maxtor, maybe that has changed and maybe not. I fell into a Seagate groove and have been happy ever since. The new one is a Seagate Exos 7E8 4TB HDD https://www.newegg.com/seagate-exos-...9SIA2W05MB4018 When I first shopped for an Enterprise capacity HDD I got suckered in by a company Newegg sold for advertising a 4TB Seagate at a bargain price. When installed it made a whirring sound characteristic of worn bearings I thought was a fan on its way out. I unplugged the fans and the noise persisted, the other drive being solid state left only one thing... WTF??? I looked for company reviews around the web and found hem, all bad, turns out I bought a pull sold as new, the dirty bastards! That's when I bought the Exos, a new model, and after zeroing the grinder trashed it. I know you're supposed to recycle electronic trash to keep the greenies happy, but taking it to the county recycling center costs even MORE money and I'm already operating at a loss, FOO YOU! (Thank you for the foo Smokey Stover.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fChnc0QIzdU
I played the classic upright video arcade games and pinballs under the pretext of testing them, when the plant manager came by he reminded me not to test them TOO long. The first computer game I played was Doom, one where you shoot everything that moves. They were demos sold at the local computer store for $1, a convenient stop on the way home from work where I bought a case and scrounged junk box parts for building The Mighty 486. When I got through the final build it was running W3.1.1 over DOS 6.2 and beat the snot out of Pentium running W95. It was laughable quite literally, all the hoopla over Pentium was just another name for a 586 CPU and W95 was a joke, it wasn't until 2000 NT when it became a standalone OS. I just loved to put the ARC's braggart to shame at Saturday breakfast meets at a local diner, always complaing about his beloved Pentium running W95 when The Mighty 486 pissed all over it.
Back to playing computer games, somewhere along the line someone produced DOS versions of those classic arcade games, I still have the package in my "Files from The Mighty 486" archive. Since I have XP on the virtual box that I used to run Winpack on before the packet network collapsed and it can emulate every Micro$haft OS back to DOS I can still play Tank and my favorite Atari games.
"Tinkering in my lab usually keeps me too busy to play them, however!"
I no longer tinker in Frankenstein Laboratories having no place to work in these days, but Bustaneardrum Productions in Powzap Studios tends to keep me occupied producing and editing audio and video files often while downloading the sickest B movies I can find, mostly 50s B&W sci-fi produced on Hollyweird's Poverty Row that Frank Zappa loved and called cheepnis. He wasn't above producing sickness, around the time The Who produced their rock opera Tommy he produced his schlock opera Joe's Garage.
(Give me de chromium cob
You'll love it!
It looks just like a Telefunken U-47)
This is the Central Scrutinizer!
You have just destroyed one model
XQJ-37 Nuclear Powered Pan-Sexual Roto-Plooker
And you're gonna have to pay for it!
So give up, you haven't got a chance!
Actually in the Scots dialect plooks are pimples which makes a plooker a pimple popper. Apparently it has quite a different meaning in left coast slang. Californians speak a different language, in their surf slang taking gas is when one wipes out and inhales water <cough> while in New York CB lingo it meant sticking one's head in the oven. I got a laugh out of Artie Windjammer telling pipsqueaks to "go take gas", so in high school print shop I ran off a few hundred "business cards" on the letterpress saying TAKE GAS and handed them out here and there.
Telefunken U47.jpg
Telefunken U-47 condenser mic
Gamer or not anyone with a computer would be well off scrapping the usual POS cheepnis keyboard for a Logitech G-610 that reduces eyestrain not needing a light source to be seen and will outlast a dozen ordinary ones. My guru steered me in the right direction (as always) as he is an avid gamer with a Logitech G-810 RBG board. I don't need to map out a keyboard with "one million colors" so the 610 with white backlighting suits my non gaming purpose well. Just one little aggravation, the default lighting scheme is left to right wave instead of the IMO more practical steady and requires full time standby power to remember the light intensity setting, when I kill mains power at the power strip for the night it reverts to full on. I can live with that, one push of a button drops it down a notch, but at first I had to load the software to reset the steady state until I discovered a hack and removed the now useless software.
Logitech G-610 / 810 keyboard lighting effects without software
Light Button + number keys
+0 = steady
+1 = wave L to R
+2 = wave R to L
+3 = wave center out
+4 = breathe
+5 = flash center out
+6 = color cycle
+plus key = faster
+minus key = slower
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