This is absolutely not a myth. There have been drives that behaved this way, including from "name brand" manufacturers. Maybe those were firmware bugs, maybe th

This is absolutely not a myth. There have been drives that behaved this way, including from "name brand" manufacturers. Maybe those were firmware bugs, maybe they stopped doing it, but it is not something made up. Of course there have also been controller bugs, file system bugs, and so on over the years. A decade ago the behavior of most file systems was quite poor in the face of underlying hardware failures but a lot of work has gone into improving the situation. SSDs are slowing improving too. Most of them have claimed to go into read-only mode when enough blocks wear out but in reality most of them would crash, fail to respond, or just lose data. It turns out manufacturers tend to be a bit loose in their claims until independent third-parties put their claims to the test. More recent models seem to be a bit better behaved in failure states.