I agree with HaQue. SSD need a decent backup regime as they may fail all of a sudden and data may be very hard or even impossible to recover if this occurs.
That said, SSD also offer a lot of benefits, for instance less mechanical risk if you move a lot with your laptop or external drive. I believe the SSD that are warranted 5 or 10 years are pretty reliable.
Although a long warranty is also a marketing argument, the brands would not take the risk of a 5-years or 10-years warranty if they were not pretty sure that such model is quite reliable. The price of NAND drops year over year, but there are also more or less incompressible production costs for the circuit board, controller, a.s.o. If the SSD manufacturers had to maintain an excessive stock of replacement SSD, it would also cost to them. If you look at the price of today's SSD with the smallest capacities (~32 GB), you can observe they cost more or less the same as those in 64 GB capacities. Of course, are the margins of distributors and merchants, but this gives some rough idea about what the incompressible production costs could be.
I use SSD for many other things than data recovery purposes, but when doing data recovery, I mostly use SSD to duplicate already extracted files so that I can post-process them on another workstation, before the completion of the analysis/carving/extraction task. Useful, in emergency cases, when seeking for some overwritten Word document for instance.
But the question was : Where to buy small capacity SSD in small lots (~ 3 to 15)?
The question could also be : Are there some distribution channels for professionnals to buy sold off small capacity SSDs?
I assume there are still some merchants having "sleeping" sealed SSD on their shelves that they hardly can sell to their customers because the capacities have become "too small" in comparison with what is marketed today.
Even manufacturers may have remaining stock of some "old fashioned" models. Or I'm wrong ?
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