Never trust second-hand SSDs
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I like to buy second-hand electronics, both as a way to save some money, to maybe help reduce e-waste a bit, and I personally find the absence of any warranty quite liberating, because I know I can do whatever I please to my devices (like, idk, drilling into them). For the most part, I’ve had a pleasant experience doing so.
There’s one thing, that I’ve always knew I should never get second-hand – SSDs. Whenever I bought a new computer, I’d replace the main drive with a fresh and new SSD. And for good reason: SSDs, especially cheap ones, have a very limited life-span, and if you don’t know what the SSD has been through, it is usually safe to assume it is not that far from death.
Yeah, so I bought this wonderful ThinkPad Yoga L380 second hand recently and forgot to replace the SSD. Basically throughout the time I had the computer, it experienced random few-second freezes. During the summer, it kernel panicked on me a few times and last week, it woke up from sleep without a boot drive a few times. As I was somewhat busy, I ignored the issues mostly, figuring it would be some driver issue and that it ought to be fixed by an update at some point.
Yesterday, the issues started getting exponentially worse and when I realised what was wrong and started attempting to save at least my SSH keys, the SSD stopped reporting to the SATA port at all.
So yeah. Never trust second-hand SSDs.
