Hello,
With the upcoming changes, I am wondering if I’ll need to get a new hub… I bought my SmartThings hub in 2016?.. The model # is STH-ETH-200. Will this survive the cut?
Here’s a related question- what if my hub up and dies? Is it fairly easy to just buy a new one and replace it?
As always- Thank you - Jim
Yes, that hub, which is the v2, will survive. It is still receiving firmware updates and the Edge (beta) drivers work with it.
Easy to buy a new hub but not so easy if your current hub dies. If it dies, you would need to rejoin all your zigbee/z-wave devices to the new hub and perform a lot of other stuff to get it back to working condition.
If a hub does not die and you purchase a new hub, you can contact ST support and try the migration tool. Note: only works with active hubs.
My advice: keep the v2 hub … no real need to update unless you want to utilize Matter in the future.
Does that mea the v2 hub won’t be suitable for matter?
Hard to say. It might work for Matter-compatible WiFi devices, but I expect people are referring to the fact that the v3 already has a Thread radio, it just hasn’t been turned on. So since the expectation is that WiFi and Thread will likely be the most popular Matter transport protocols initially, SmartThings might decide to only support Matter for the Thread-enabled hubs, just to avoid any confusion. But we don’t have full details yet on how ST will handle Matter. 
I wonder if this is something the USB port could be utilised for on the v2.
We can dream
It’s not impossible, there are several thread dongles available now. But of course you need the hub to be a Thread border router, not just a Device, so it can manage the network. Let’s just say it seems like it’s much more likely for the V3.