The Crucial MX500 is a solid choice, has a few more gimmicks than the 970 EVO (like protection against shortouts) and is similairly priced. Only thing is that is juuuuust slightly slower than the Samsung one, but it's barely noticeable outside benchmarks.

But two years for an SSD is definitively not normal, a standard cheap 850 EVO has a lifespan of 10 years.
Remember that all SSDs die without warning though, so you might want to buy an external hard drive and backup your data there (or build a RAID system, which is the safer, but more expensive option).

Well, with SSDs, you can pretty much cut the entire market in the following segments:

1. Samsung. They are the best now, period. They are also expensive, but the drives are the most reliable and fastest in any segment, from consumer grade EVO to high-performance PRO. Their NVMe M.2 SSDs are fast as fuck.
2. Intel. They managed to catch up significantly to Samsung and they can be even more reliable over long terms. They are also ridiculously expensive and seem to aim mostly at business/enterprise grade drives.
3. Everything else. It is a giant blob of a zillion brands. Adata, Patriot, Kingmax, Kingston, Silicon Power, Crucial are some of the more known brands, but almost all are the same. They are cheap, and, well, slow, but still good even for system drives. If you cannot afford a Samsung, just pick whatever you want and whichever is the cheapest.
   In this segment, most anyone has a favourite. I am partial to the AMD-branded drives, but it is personal preference after a while.

Always backup anything you don't want to lose. If it is important, create two backups.

I would personally get an 860 EVO, they have come down in price a lot recently and are great drives. Currently on Amazon for $163 for 1TB or $87 for 500GB. I would get the 500GB. If you want to save money and don't need a big drive, the 250GB is only $56.

it would not only be as fast as Ricky Bobby

View attached image.

View attached image.

Get 2 hdd's and run them in raid mirror. That way when one drive fails you can still work while waiting for replacement. True, it's nowhere close to read speeds of ssd, but who really needs that in the first place? I found that for my workloads investing in ram gives better performance gain than ssd.

Haven't had an SSD died on me yet. Or on anyone of my family that I know. Some 60GB SSDs there that still function (or were functioning before being upgraded).

Can't really offer any advice. Personally I just ordered a Kingston A400 on Amazon simply because it's $33 and should be enough for my needs. Has 3 year warranty, and apparently Kingston has a utility to help detect when an SSD reaches end of life, which I guess would be useful to run.

I have a 6 yrs HDD which has been giving a lot of problems for a long time, System boot and startup takes more than 5 min and games like KF2 takes ages to load.
So I had been looking for a good SSD. Read a lot of reviews and ended up choosing EVO 970.
Since their Samsung Magician Software is really good as I have heard, I didn't focus on extra lifespan. They seem so confident with their EVO 970 that they bumped their warranty form previous gen EVO 960's 3 years to 5 years on this one, same as that of PRO 970.
5 years is a long time, specially regarding your data, So I guess many of us wont take a chance on it and upgrade to a new primary storage for OS and personal data, leaving the older one for non-sensitive secondary data storage for the rest of its lifespan.

Good news for others:
NAND Flash chip product prices might fall by more than 15% by 4Q of 2018. 25-30% at the end of 2019.
DRAM price may fall by 5% by 4Q of 2018. 15-10% at the end of 2019.
Source: DRAM and NAND Flash Products to See Price Decline in 4Q18 and 2019 due to Gap Between Supply and Demand

My Samsung 830 is fortunately still running fine after six years.

I've been (slowly) researching a new pc and Tom's Hardware is always worth reading: Best SSDs 2018: From Budget to Blazing Speed.

More basic stuff: How to Buy the Right SSD

Disclaimer: I am hardly a tech expert or well-informed with latest tech. My recommendation is based on personal research and experience. I recently had a discussion with couple of SG members on SSD:
https://www.steamgifts.com/discussion/SMdRu/people-who-have-0-disposable-income-how-come#x3gdxft

As far as I know, Drives have at least a longevity of 3-5yrs. Although I never had a physical drive that I use for Primary OS that died on me. Did you get a random brand? You can always go back to the manufacturer and check with them. I have bought Hitachi, Western Digital and Samsung Drives before. I generally stick with WD or Samsung.

Certainly Samsung Evo is a base investment and Pro is an investment for the future but I am not comfortable with the price. Also apart from considering the price, how you are going to use the drive is also important. For now, I'll say 500GD is sufficient to last at least 3yrs with games or data growing above that limit. If you are "Lazy/Untidy" and likes to install alot of games at once for easy access then you'll look into going beyond 500. Even Streamers do not have above 500GB drives as its not cost efficient unless you do graphical designs, video editing, high resource work.
Regards and Cheers, Cruse~