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My dad managed to kill a 2 year old Samsung SSD; it wouldn't even show up on the bios. Tech support was so incredulous they actually had an Electrical Engineer on their staff call him.

I didn't believe him either. I was like "Dad, SSDs are designed to fail in a way you can recover data. What SATA cable are you using? Is the port dead?"

Turns out it was literally the drive.

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I recall hearing of similar failures early on. I don't recall the brand. Apparently the controller goes bad and it just stops responding to SATA commands.

Intel had a strategy that caused them to go into read only mode once they reached their rated lifetime write capacity. All data remained available until they were power cycled whereupon they would intentionally brick themselves.

In my case it is was a Crucial M4. It still tries to operate but will fail the long SMART self test.

Much like a poster above, I've got a walking graveyard of previous platter drives in my workstation from various old workstations and they're all fine, but (and I think mine was a Samsung too), my first experiment with an SSD ended in tears. It was fine for similarly about two years, then I had some weird troubles booting about 3 or 4 times, then it just disappeared completely.

I've been very wary of SSDs since then.

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