So I was playing Fo4 and everything was going well and then I heard a "duh-dunk" the sound of a usb or device being plugged/unplugged. My game (which is all on my C drive thankfully) quickly went to desk top and then resumed. I didn't think much of it but when I was done playing, I noticed that my second drive was missing in device manager as well as computer management. The next thing I know, I am getting a BSOD. After a few frozen starts, I got her up running again but the drive is not showing in bios. I figured I had lost it since it is an old WD blue from 2008. Kinda sucks there were no warnings, no death clicks, just dead in an instant. I swapped sata data and power cables just in case and sata ports but it's not even spinning. I have one of those USB to sata plugs and I tried it on my laptop. It's dead. I tried the refrigerator trick even and it's gone forever. Everything on that drive was games, video editing software and basically storage.
  So my question is, at this point in time, is a good SSD reliable for secondary storage?  This system is just for gaming, video editing and browsing. I rarley keep more than a few games on my drive at a time. Do the "cells" last longer if they are not all the way "full" (IE; only using a small amount at a time with a larger drive?) I keep reading things like flash storage is in high demand because of whatever new phone or product right now so it's a bad time to buy. Do prices fluctuate that much? I am thinking of saving up for a Samsung 850 EVO 500Gb. My current OS ssd is a Samsung 256 Gig and it's been great. Any thoughts?
 
 

I have seen an increase in SSD pricing over the last year or so.  What I have seen especially spike are the "entry" level SSD drive prices.  I was buying 120GB drives that were once around $35 and now they up to $50-$60 unless they are on sale.  I paid $170 for a 512GB 850PRO a little over a year ago - now that same drive is $250.  As far as "wear" on a SSD drive the writes are what causes wear not reads.  Most drives employ some sort of "wear leveling" meaning when you write new data the drive will attempt to place the data in memory that has not been written to before or has less cycles on the flash.  Having a drive more full will decrease write speed due to the drive trying to move static data around from the wear leveling algorithm.
 
SLC/MLC flash based drives will have a longer write endurance than TLC based ones and come with a longer warranty but cost more.  That's one of the main differences between the 850EVO and PRO models.  Even with that said TLC drives still will last a long time.  If you wrote a constant 10GB of new data to a 256GB TLC drive every day it would still take 23.4 years to wear it out (theoretically).  http://www.anandtech.com/show/6459/samsung-ssd-840-testing-the-endurance-of-tlc-nand
 
IMO lack of reliability for SSD isn't so much the reason not to use it for secondary storage - it's more the cost per GB.  For data that you don't need high speed access to a platter drive still has the cost advantage.  If I were going to replace that drive with another platter I would look into something like a Hitachi Ultrastar (or even Deskstar) drive.  I've got 4x Ultrastar 7K3000 (2TB) drives running in my server 24/7 for the last 5 years and they've never missed a beat.  "Enterprise" grade drives generally have a tenancy to last longer than a standard model - the Hitachi drives are rated for 2.0 million hours MTBF which is quite a long time.  If you were to get one of these I wouldn't call it "rolling the dice" per-say.  SSDs can fail too!
 
If you're going to go SSD - the key is to watch for a good sale and jump on it.  For instance - this 500GB drive for $119 is a really good deal compared to what I have seen lately: https://www.newegg.com/Pr...mp;Tpk=N82E16820329008 and is from a well-known NAND manufacturer.  Samsung used to be the best drives hands-down and they've priced themselves higher because of the reputation.  They've faced stiff competition lately in both speed and reliability to the point I don't feel they automatically are worth their price premium anymore.  Especially after the 840EVO fiasco.

Just looked at newegg and they have SATA III about 500 GB for under  $200 and even a 850 evo for $179 and a crucial 525 GB for $150.  When you go larger the money seems to go up fast. 

+1 WD Black for storage
 
Games can play better from SSD, perhaps get a bigger "C" drive
 
 

I've had good luck with just WD Black hard drives as secondary storage for gaming. Fallout 4 though has some micro stutter that may drive you to desire it on an SSD. There's a lot of controversy over how this game runs with all kinds of hardware factors(I won't get into that), but I would not say that SSDs are at the justifiable price point just yet for a mass gaming storage drive.
 
To me, I would just get a large capacity WD Black and wait until mainstream SATA III SSDs are at least as low as $200/1TB.