Would it be small enough to where it wouldn’t make an effect while gaming?Yes and no. They certainly develop bad pages as they get older, and the controller needs to swap in good pages from the spare area to keep the drive in good health. If this happened when you were reading a file, it would slow down the transfer. Not really to a perceptible degree, but it would be slower than reading data from 100% good pages.
If the drive was literally about to fail, it might be scrambling around looking for good pages constantly, which would result in noticeable slowdown, but if you were to see that, then likely your SSD is more than 10 years old and it’s urgently new drive time!
Would it be small enough to where it wouldn’t make an effect while gaming?
My 7+ years old (59k power-on hours) 1TB WD Black still performs pretty much good as new as far as I can tell. The performance of most drives does not change much until they start having errors from wear and it can go to hell pretty fast from there. The first sign of impending doom is when the pending or reallocated sector count creeps up - one of the heads or platters has been damaged and are now slowly destroying each other.I know that HDDs do but would SSDs not since it’s not a mechanical component?
I know that HDDs do.
would SSDs not since it’s not a mechanical component?
A 10 year old HDD will perform as good as when it was new.