I recently had to RMA a Samsung 840 EVO that was less than 3 years old, and had only seen light usage (but no extended offline time). It just suddenly stopped r

I recently had to RMA a Samsung 840 EVO that was less than 3 years old, and had only seen light usage (but no extended offline time). It just suddenly stopped responding to ATA commands, returning errors. All the SMART attributes were fine and the drive even gave itself a clean bill of health. Distressingly, even as it was returning read/write errors like crazy, the SMART read/write error attributes stayed at 0. It was running the latest firmware. I could not even do an ATA secure erase to reset it to clean condition, as that command returned an error as well. I sent it out for RMA, they returned it with the work description "firmware upgraded" and no further information. It's the same drive, but it's been zeroed/factory-reset. I have backups, so I'm not too concerned about losing data, but this episode didn't exactly make me confident in the quality of SSD firmware, especially since samsung is supposed to be one of the better manufacturers out there. Just one anecdote, make of it what you will. Of course, I've had countless hard drives fail over the years as well, but the failure mode is very different, there's no partial read possible and it just happened all of a sudden with no indication.