IT/Hardware/Hard Drives
I like Samsung SSD drives. That's a full stop at the end of the previous sentence!
General
Smart Control
This is software for managing hard drives. It works well for Samsung SSDs
You will need to install smartctl which comes in the gsmartcontrol package. It is no longer standalone.
The most important piece of information is the Total Terabytes Written. Find with the command below.
sudo /usr/sbin/smartctl -A /dev/sda | awk '$0~/LBAs/{ printf "TBW %.1f\n", $10 * 512 / 1024^4 }'
The graphical tool gives you Total LBAs written. Take that number and divide by 2,000,000,000 to roughly get TBW.
You can expect 75 to 300 TBW on a 1/2 TB (512 GB) drive.
Copying a root files system
This is when for some reason you can't or don't want to clone the partition.
rsync -avP --numeric-ids --exclude='/dev' --exclude='/proc' --exclude='/sys' root@failedharddrivehost:/ /path/to/destination/