&gt; If a drive is failing, it will usually collapse into read only mode and let you know that it is failing, giving you ample time to recover data.<p>Do you have any real world references of this kind of fail behavior occurring? I only have experience with mechanical HDD failure (RAID drives gone bad -&gt; degraded until rebuild; non-RAID drives getting massive bad sectors; non-RAID drives click -&gt; dead). I&#x27;ve read about drives supposedly being able to enter a &quot;nice&quot; readonly mode, but that was a couple years or more ago, about SSDs. More recently, I&#x27;ve only read about drives either entering readonly mode until power cycle, then completely inaccessible; or simply lockup and completely inaccessible.