The freeze/reboot/fine cycle seems to be a common one for SSDs acting poorly, running out of blocks they want to use internally, or memory or cache or something

The freeze/reboot/fine cycle seems to be a common one for SSDs acting poorly, running out of blocks they want to use internally, or memory or cache or something, or just hanging in their own firmware for whatever other reason. One of my earlier forays into switching to SSDs, I installed Intel... I think it was 525, 535, something like that, 2.5 inch SATA drives in several different machines. Every one has failed by now with this similar mode of (in)operation. On my desktop where I had one, it would simply bluescreen, but then come back fine until eventually reading certain parts of the disk would just always cause it to hang and it had to be replaced. Failed SSDs like this are interesting because Windows (and to a lesser extent Linux) really aren't prepared for the disk to just hang, so trying to recover anything off them can be a challenge. Just recently I found out the last one I had around, in a little headless desktop server, was the cause of my problems with it where it would partially hang after a couple days of uptime. Having finally gotten around to having it hooked up to a display, I was treated to a sea of red dmesg errors from the disk. I think ultimately part of the problem was new power-saving features Intel had tried to add for these disks, which would cause them to write to themselves a large amount and just eat through their useful lifetime much faster than you'd assume. In almost every case, I replaced these with, of course... Samsungs. Though I believe I've been lucky enough not to choose any of their bad ones.