A little side track here. Once I was playing around with the HDD on a Thinkpad, switching between HDD and a 2.5" SATA SSD, and found that the system kept crashing during boot with non original HDD. Later to find that it was the aluminum shielding piece of the original HDD I missed, when installed back to the new HDD it booted normally. I did not have the same problem with the SSD, but to be safe it is better to put back that piece even with the SSD.

My first SSD (64GB) had a firmware bug. After it accumulated 1500 power-on hours, it would stop responding about 30 minutes after power-on. A firmware update was rolled out quick. Still going strong today with nearly 105000 power-on hours.

I recently had a Samsung 950 Pro die on me. Simply stopped responding to the system. After a hard reboot, it no longer registered in the BIOS. Tried it on multiple systems and external enclosures. No sign of life at all.

I've yet to have an SDD die on me (probably because I said that ...) . I should say, when I've changed them out it wasn't because they died. More like I could afford a higher density one and then swapped out. We'll see now as most all of mine that are 'spinning' are 1TB or 2TB drives, so no need to be changing them out. My price point for 4TB SSDs hasn't came down anywhere near to my $100 to $150 price point!

SSDs have been so good to me that with the exception of my NAS with a 14 TB Ironwolf spinner, I'm just about done with normal USB drives, I bought an Asus NVME M.2 enclosure, all metal that is shock and waterproof and fits in my pocket and connects via USB for portable use.

I've recently adapted an Enterprise server device, an Icy Dock PCIe M.2 caddy, by getting an extra caddy (though switching NVMEs in one is rather quick) so it behaves something like a Floppy drive but with many Terabytes of real estate and extremely serious bandwidth and speed - just slap one in and that drive can have the whole deal to itself for an OpSys with a 2nd drive in a mobo slot for common storage. I'm loving it.

Thanks for heads up. I use an Icy Dock in my server for sata SSD drives. Has six slots for 2.5 SSDs. My motherboard only supports 6 SATA drives, and one SATA port is for my backup 4TB HDD for those quick "local backup" times (note is in an external bay to, so it can be changed out quickly if needed). So I've only populated 5 (all 2TB drives) ... Just once I wanted to max out a motherboard disk capability for 'fun' as I am far far far from needing all that space. In reality I only have 1.8TB of data. Go figure . I also put a 4 slot 2.5 disk Icy Dock in my R&D box, but I no longer use it as the newer AM4 motherboard has two PCIe NVME slots which is all I need for / and /home.

That's quite cool, rclark. One of my concerns that led me to the M.2 dock was that most motherboards use shared bandwidth PCIe lanes at least on some slots. I want all the bandwidth I can get so fewer drives seems the way to go for max performance, especially since I use up PCIe slots commonly with serious peripherals.

There is something to note when using SSD via USB. According to my experience, not all SSD/NVMe can be used via USB due to the power requirement. I've got a Samsung EVO SATA SSD with a USB adapter, I found that it won't mount at all on some Lenovo desktops, but can be used with the rear USB ports. After checking the power requirement on some SATA SSD and 2.5" spinning drive, I found that SSD actually consumpt more power, not to mention NVMe. I also used SSD on the Raspberry Pi, and found most of them can't boot normally via USB with data errors, but worked fine with the spinning drive.

So do I. With the RPI4 I had to be careful what I used. But the RPI5 seems to like whatever I hook up to it using the the 27W power supply. On one test, I booted off a USB 1TB T7 and in other USB3 port a 4TB external HDD. Had a mouse and keyboard on the USB 2 ports. Plus a HDMI screen hooked up. No problem. I backed up my server thru it to the 4TB drive and went off without a hitch. The RPI4 puked on that setup. One WD NVME M.2 SSD (using the new PCIE add-on board) I had to update the RPI5 eeprom to get it to work. That was the only glitch I ran into with the RPI5.

On my server, I have only one slot in use for a ethernet 2.5G card.

Advantage to powered USB external cases that do not depend upon USB delivered power, just data. Easier on the host as well!

The only downside is two (or more) power cords used for one little machine... But if you have to... you have to.