"If you already own an SSD produced in the last five years, you may want to hold onto it. For the last decade we've watched the technology progress, but at the same time, meaningful growth has slowed or stalled due to cost-saving measures in NAND and controller technologies."
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It was quite interesting...
Still need a old SSD for my old Pc
I feel like that article is missing or avoiding a lot of information.
Endurance
This has never been a secret, SLC has always had higher endurance than MLC, MLC higher than TLC. Using the lowest number for 3D TLC at 1000 cycles, would that not mean that a 240 GB 3D TLC drive be able to read/write 240 TB to the drive? I know for commercial/industrial uses that would be one thing, but would the average consumer push that much data through? With all of my friends I'd say at least 95% of them would never go through that much data.
Also, I'd say that as the technologies mature they'd only get more reliable as the kinks work out. Same reason why one should be wary of first models of cars.
Performance
The article specifically mentions the Intel 600p being slow in sustained write. One SSD in one application. I wouldn't say that speaks for the whole of SSDs. Just starting with the 600p, to be frank, it's not a fast NVMe drive. It's actually an extremely slow NVMe drive, but it is cheap. With SSDs it comes down to performance, capacity, and price; it's really only possible to get two of those at most at the same time. The 600p happens to have the latter two.
Another thing to think about is the interface. I've seen a lot of people automatically go with "It's M.2 so it has to be fast". That's not necessarily true since M.2 can interface with many controllers, including PCIe and SATA. PCIe 3.0 x4 is a fast interface, there is no questioning that, but M.2 does not require an SSD to use it. A lot of the cheaper M.2 SSDs actually use SATA, meaning that no matter how fast their chips are they will only ever be as fast as the SATA controller they go through. And SATA has been a limiting factor for years now, I have an SSD I bought in 2012 that pretty much maxed out SATA 6 Gbps. Wasn't too expensive either, about $120 for 240 GB. Same reason why 2.5" and mSATA SSDs always seem to max out around 600 MB/s on reads or writes.
I'm a bit ranty when it comes to Tom's right now. The quality of some of their articles seems to be slipping from what I remember them being.
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Yeah using a single drive for argument isn't the best. I would have liked to see more comparisons and also a look at this issue with PCIe M.2 drives.
Tom's used to be THE goto site for PC tech articles. Now they seem to cater to n00bs.
I still think their reviews are OK, if taken with a large grain of salt. But most n00b's either read it as gospel or think 'this article is all I need to know'.
I view this article as 'Be aware of the issue, this is brief summary that is tainted by the authors agenda.'
I just finished checking specs and my PCIe Intel and Crucial SSD's are MLC and the Samsung is V-NAND.
I guess I'm good and the performance is great so far.
The problem is that this age cycle is the hard limit for the various forms of ssd write/read tech there is little improving that will happen in the regard as the tech matures as its the physical limitation of the silicon technology in manufacturing not the data storage method. We have seen issues because of this arise with buffering to Hard drive with streaming services like spottily putting lots of read write ware on ssd's
Classic scaremongering about how TLC doesn't last. Either the writer is knowingly putting out that BS or is so uninformed that he shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a PC. I'm not sure which of the 2 is worse.
Even TLC SSDs will usually outlast the rest of your hardware.
Anandtech properly tested the endurance of the 840EVO a couple of times and found that those will easily last a decade even if you write 10GB to it every single day of its life. 10GB per day is an insane amount for a consumer. In reality you'll be upgrading to a larger SSD long before the NAND is even half-worn.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6459/samsung-ssd-840-testing-the-endurance-of-tlc-nand
Even in the big multi-ssd endurance test that Tech Report did, their TLC 840 only started showing reallocated sectors once it past the 100TB mark and then it soldiered on until almost 900TB before failing.
Nine hundred Tera!
Sorry if I seem to be focusing on the 840EVO. I just happen to have 3 of those so I look for those instinctively as I'm very familiar with them. It's just the first name that comes to mind when thinking about TLC SSDs
.
There is no need for SSDs that last 20 years or longer, certainly not with how storage devices keep getting larger all the time.
25 years from now a 1TB SSD will be a slow ancient relic with barely enough room to house the OS and 1 or 2 games. So why would it be a problem if SSDs only last around 10-20 years with normal use? Hell, even enterprise-grade HDDs are on borrowed time after only 5 years!
As for lack of increase in speed, I'm calling bullshit on that.
Five years ago we were pushing the limits of SATA3. That's why they introduced M.2, U.2, PCIe SSDs etc.
The theoretical maximum throughput of an M.2 NVMe SSD is 4GB/s, Puget estimates that in reality we won't see more than 3.9GB/s. The 960PRO is rated for 3500MB/s read speed and I know from experience that Samsung tends to be conservative when it comes to their numbers. So we're already really close to M.2's limit in terms of read speed.
If the rest of the hardware can barely keep up, why should we keep pushing the speeds? We need a new standard first, preferably one that'll last more than 5 years this time. The speeds are getting ridiculous really and on average they're actually increasing at a greater rate all the time.
I bet that the writer only looked at SATA3 SSDs and indeed didn't see much of an improvement there. Of course not, the manufacturers were focusing on new form factors to increase the speed because SATA3 had little room for improvement.
As for people reverting to spinning rust paired with Optane ... sigh
Optane can only be so fast when it has read the files from the HDD before you request them. If you do open a file that it didn't expect, it has to read it from HDD anyway, in which case you are stuck with HDD response time and read speeds.
The "Optane + spinning rust" approach also has a couple of other drawbacks.
For starters there's the noise. Plenty of people have no HDDs inside their case for silence. Mass storage on HDDs is only really good for movies etc, where speed doesn't matter. That's why we have NASes in another room or in the basement. Do you really think we would want to go back to having all that whining and rattling inside our PC case?
Then there's the reliability of HDDs. Head crashes, short lifetime (compared to SSDs), sensitive to vibrations or shocks, etc etc.
Optane is like those SSHDs really (it's actually the exact same thing, just larger, faster and consisting of 2 physical items instead of 1 package). A nice idea on paper but almost useless in the real world. Good for datacenters perhaps, but not really for consumers.
Of course there will always be idiots who go the Optane route because it's the new hotness, but they'll most likely be disappointed in the long run.
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Classic case of reacting to test scores without know what the numbers mean.
'This one will last 20 years and that one will only last 10 years. So it must be twice as good.'
What are the chances that you will still be using a 10 year old SSD, when we will have moved onto optical crystal cube storage or something more exotic by then.
To give an automotive example:
A Lamborghini Aventador costs $400,00 and has a top speed of 217 MPH.
A Chevrolet Corvette costs $56,00 and has a top speed of only 195 MPH. What a POS!
If the speed limit is 65, who cares about another 22 MPH that costs $344,000 to achieve.
Yeah, well ...
While the speed limit may be 65, it is very much possible for those cars to go faster than that on public roads. Depending on how much faster you go, you'll probably either end up in jail, hospital or the morgue. 
All in all, it's just silly really. SSDs last more than long enough and at this point in time are so fast that we're going to need yet another connection or form factor soon. So the demise of MLC really isn't an issue. It's not like anyone is ever going to actually wear out his/her SSD unless he/she is doing it on purpose.
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Fearmongering more or less, SSDs have only gotten better and better with MLC and TLC.
The first consumer SSDs were very unreliable long term, some people compared their lifespan to having milk in a fridge.
Right now any normal consumer doesn't have to worry about getting an TLC based SSD, they're very good products usually.
SSD reliability is much higher than HDDs as well, SSDs rarely die suddenly but it takes a long time to wear them out.
Even the 120gb intel SSD I use that's from 2012 based on MLC just recently dropped down to 96% of its usable life indicator in the smart statistics, by this rate I'm probably dead before I can wear it out.
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My point / comparison was that with most SSD's one has more performance than they will ever need or use.
The more we test Intel's Optane Memory the more we like it. At this point we would recommend Optane Memory (the cache NVMe SSD) paired with a 7,200RPM hard drive over a 1TB TLC SSD. And we're not the only ones to notice the performance benefits; Seagate has a large campaign on social media promoting Optane Memory.
Stop reading Toms Hardware already.
Excuse my blunt.
Sounds like Toms Hard..ware again for Intel Optane.
Recommending an optane for consumers is like recommending cancer to make use of the free health care benefits. (Only participating countries ofcourse)
Why, is your ole' ssd starting to show its age?
Do you experience slow downs that have almost nothing to do with you ssd?
then YOU need intel optane ssd (available on limited chipsets only, consult your doctor before taking, terms and conditions apply)
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While the article is pretty crappy there is abit of truth to it. 2 of my friends bought those cheap as dirt Kingston 120gb TLC ssd's and they are both failing after 4 years. Those new Muskin eco 3 TLC drives are as slow as a hard drive on large writes.
Basically some TLC ssds are shit and some are just as good as MLC
As for me I'll hold onto my MLC Crucial m500 for as long as I can
Hmmm... It seems that cheap ssds perform worse and fail earlier than the more expensive ones.
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Also the nand chips may last for many terrorbytes, but other components may fail...
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4 years on my Samsung 840 pro SSD.
Still working fine, but yeah its MLC. 
My 4 year old 1TB 840EVO has almost 13K power-on hours. That's a little under 9h per day.
29.5TB written and 93% left according to S.M.A.R.T.'s wear leveling stat. At this rate it's going to be worn out in around 50 years.
Oh crap, I'm so scared about how fast TLC dies. Better get me some spinning rust and optane !
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I will just point out for fairness' sake to everyone in the thread that is going on about how long their 840 evo is lasting, lets not forget that Samsung does have a lot of secret sauce software to keep their TLC drives going faster, longer, than any other brand really. And it's not like Samsung hasn't had to put out numerous firmware updates for the 830 and 840 TLC drives to keep them going strong. Most manufactures don't do that, lets be honest. If you look towards the lower tier manufactures, its not so great with their TLC products... Samsung is not the rule in the SSD space, their the exception in most cases.