I assume the only reason for not turning off and taking the drive out to image "offline" is because SSDs have been known to permanently brick themselves when po

I assume the only reason for not turning off and taking the drive out to image "offline" is because SSDs have been known to permanently brick themselves when power-cycled, but I agree with the others here that trying to interact with the filesystem on a dying storage device is a really bad idea. Incidentally, having experienced an SSD and HDD death within the past few months, the HDD definitely gave far more early warning signs (including some very audible ones) than the SSD, and failed in a "softer" fashion.