So yes and no.. writing to the SSD is what diminishes & shortens the efficiency and lifespan however just being powered up the memory cells still degrade over time. I think they're still at an average of 25-30% less failure rate than spinning disk HD's though (as far as premature failure is concerned) but man does that get expensive to run a SSD raid esp ones that are ranked with higher write cycles than the ones you typically find on black friday sales. At this stage I buy new drives for my media center but use recycled ex-datacenter or enterprise drives that have been refurbished by the manufacturer to keep it cheap for my backup raid (if it's refurbished by the manufacturer you can get 5 year warranty's on it even if it has a high power-on #). Just gotta keep up with ebay to find barely used ones sold in bulk to get the good deals because they're dumping 100+ at a time.
https://serverpartdeals.com/ is also another good source for factory refurbished datacenter/enterprise drives as well. Those can sometimes come with an even longer warranty but out of every 10 drives i'll get factory refurbished, 1 will usually be an RMA after running the S.M.A.R.T tests on em.
https://github.com/AnalogJ/scrutiny is a project that looks promising, it runs your basic S.M.A.R.T tests (and demon in the background afterwards) in addition to integrating real world failure rates to determine if you got a dud or not and can alert you when it suspects a drive is starting to go south on you.
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