Safe to create an image of a failing SSD?

Also, what make/model is this drive?  How old is it?  I ask for my own statistical enlightenment...

The old (about 5 years) SSD is a Samsung PM830.
Replacing with a Crucial MX300.

Is there a better option which will give me a a higher chance of success or is this simply one of the negative consequences of using SSDs?

Newer SSD's have become more reliable especially the PCIe-NVMe drives (more advanced than SATA)

On the contrary!  SSDs should be more reliable - they have no moving parts.

SSDs are the future - don't sweat it.

I see, so it sounds like I will need to brace myself for the joys of a fresh install if this fails.
The SSD came with an Acronis True Image HD software key. I'll create an image with that as well and try that first.
Maybe Crucial has high confidence in that product (fingers crossed).

Correction: This software is meant to be used to clone the drive right away rather than restore from an image. Hopefully that works. Any idea how long this would take for a 256GB drive?
I need to do this on a remote site and I will be stuck there until this is done.

Acronis True Image is a great product.  I think it will fit the bill for you.

How long it takes depends on how much data is on the drive, but expect to invest a few hours.

All the data is actually installed on other drives, which are fine now and are being backup so data loss is not an issue.

The idea behind not doing a fresh install is there are so many programs installed on the PC it will be very time consuming to re-do it all.

I have Acronis Drive Monitor installed which is reporting it's Wear Leveling count Raw Value as 3266 and marks this as a fail

On your suggestion, I downloaded Samsung SSD software called 'Samsung Magician'.
It is instead reporting the 'Raw Data' is 3266 while the 'Current Value' is 10 and marks this as OK.

So maybe there is no problem with the SSD?

That would be great news...though I would do the cloning anyway before a failure does occur.
The new SSD is higher capacity anyway so it will be an upgrade.

I would always rather believe what the manufacturer's tool reports than a 3rd party tool. But since there doesn't seem to be any issue with the SSD at the moment, imaging it now should be no problem.

On the other hand you should always ask yourself, is all that installed software really needed? 99% of the PC's I've seen had a lot of stuff installed that wasn't necessary, or no longer needed. a fresh installation along with just the needed software is often a very good idea.

how did you know the SSD is failing?

what happens  exactly?  erors, messages?

Many times the SSD failure notices are warning you that the reserved space for failures is gone or near gone... SSD's  usually have about 10% reserved for failed sector replacement...

P.S.  The wear leveling percentage in, as of itself, is a fuzzy number.  There are a few other variables that come into play, which are vendor/product specific and only available under NDA to developers.  Reason is that the percentage can even go negative and be flat out wrong based on write amplification settings and how much of the device was provisioned for housekeeping.

Buy a decent replacement.   Don't use a RAID controller either or TRIM will not work, and the device will get used up much faster.  Make sure your O/S chooses optimal sectoring to eliminate read/modify/write cycles.

SSDs fail differently than magnetic disks.  You don't explain what makes you think the drive is failing, but it is possible that is is perfectly readable.

Sounds like you have all your data.

Clone it, boot from the image, CHKDSK, and if CHKDSK comes up clean, you're probably good to go.

Thank you everyone, very informative responses here. Learned more about SSDs than I knew before. :).
Will keep this all in mind when doing the cloning.