SSD Anomoly

I have an Apacer A350 120GB SSD that I use for backups of my Core2Duo using Linux. Last couple of weeks it has been slowing down when I run a backup of the main Samsung drive which is 250gb. I know what your thinking how do I backup 250gb onto 120gb SSD. Foxclone that I use only backs up the used space, but going off topic now.

Anyway the Apacer was formatted with EXT4 FS and has been fine up to now. I ran a backup today and it was so slow I gave up and backed up to another spinny HDD. So I booted into my Linux Distro and tried copying the backup files from the spinny HDD to the Apacer SSD - again slow, about 5 kb/s copying speed. So I deleted the partition and re-formattted with NTFS. This failed.

Shutdown PC ready to swap the Apacer with a Crucial drive. Unplugged the Apacer from the SATA port and in a flash of inspiration decided to blow on the connector and plug the Apacer back in. Booted back into the OS and the partition program indicated no Partition Table - so I created a GPT Table and NTFS partition and this time it worked without error.

I copied the 3 folders on the spinny HDD over to the Apacer SSD and this time the speed was about 50 mb/s and finished in 20 minutes. The SSD is over 3 years old and has been regularly trimmed but unplugging the SATA port seems to have cured it.

Is it time to replace it with the Crucial or run it til I can access it anymore?