The SSD Endurance Experiment: Casualties on the way to a petabyte
I find it astonishing that none of the drives that died finished in a state where their data was accessible.  Some of these drives even intentionally self-brick themselves at end-of-life:<p><pre><code>  According to Intel, this end-of-life behavior generally   
  matches what's supposed to happen. The write errors 
  suggest the 335 Series had entered read-only mode. When 
  the power is cycled in this state, a sort of self-destruct 
  mechanism is triggered, rendering the drive unresponsive.
</code></pre>
So you enter a read-only mode, and then on power cycle you self-destruct, making the intact data inaccessible?  In what circumstance is that possibly the right choice?<p><pre><code>  Intel says attempting writes in the read-only state could   
  cause problems, so the fact that Anvil kept trying to push 
  data onto the drive may have been a factor.
</code></pre>
Oh, I see.  Maybe it's to prevent the unwanted writes from damaging the drive.  Wait, what?  The attempted writes can damage a drive that is in read-only mode?