The critical difference is the SSDs all indicated they were "past expiration date" with the SMART wear indicators. The Samsung indicators were overly conservati

The critical difference is the SSDs all indicated they were "past expiration date" with the SMART wear indicators. The Samsung indicators were overly conservative it appears, dropping to dead long before the drive actually died. Their software is garbage though, reporting a healthy drive even though the SMART indicators are telling you it is close to death. Obviously they never bothered to test a nearly-expired drive... probably the same reason the Intel drive bricked itself instead of coming up in read-only mode. I doubt they tested this scenario very well (not that we software engineers ever just test the golden path either...) In any case, all the drives so far indicated they were destined to keel over via the SMART attributes long before it actually happened... Certainly long enough to buy a new drive and copy all the data, even for the less reliable TLC drive. In fact even under a heavy workstation load you'd have enough time to save up money working a minimum wage part-time job, order the SSD when it goes on sale, wait for it to arrive via ground shipping, forget that you need an external SATA adapter, save up for that, order it, wait for shipping, then copy the data. My original Intel X25-M G2, which I used for several years in my daily workstation, had around 4 TB total writes before I replaced it. That's two orders of magnitude lower than the apparent limit for these drives.