I don't have a lot of experience with SSDs, but my impression is that their failure mode tends to be abrupt complete failure. The "soft" failure mode is based

I don't have a lot of experience with SSDs, but my impression is that their failure mode tends to be abrupt complete failure. The "soft" failure mode is based on the assumption that the flash chip wear-out is the failure mode and thus the worn out pages will be (slowly) accumulating and being (gracefully) replaced with non-worn-out pages. If that happens, the failure would indeed be gradual and result in the SSD going into a read-only mode. My (limited) experience is that is not the dominant failure mode. It would be really useful if BackBlaze could weigh in on their failure mode experiences. ---- It is like LED lights where the manufacturer advertises essentially infinite LED life and they are not lying; the LEDs last a very long time. The problem is, the dominant failure mode is the electronics that power the LEDs and have a MUCH shorter life that the LEDs themselves. <cough> cheap caps </cough>