Originally Posted by AudioTrack
I am pretty sure that the freezer trick is for hard disk drives only.
Far as I know that's correct. Flash memory actually works in part due to heat, so it'll get warm quickly anyway.

Originally Posted by AudioTrack
DC offset
If the scope can be set to AC coupled, that'll avoid any DC offset. If not, put a capacitor of a few tens of nanofarads in series between the probe and voltage rail.

Originally Posted by AudioTrack
I hope that I'm not tempting fate, but I have only ever used Crucial in my systems, and never encountered any issues.
Both Crucial and Micron stuff are good quality. I don't think I've had any of it fail on me.

Originally Posted by Gordon Scott
The chips also tend to be more robust if the cells are low-density and less robust if they're high density, e.g., cells per square inch.
Yup. SLC vs MLC vs TLC vs QLC. The lower the amount of layers per cell the faster and more reliable the drive will be. Most drives are TLC or QLC these days though, so pick a TLC over QLC whenever possible.

Originally Posted by Gordon Scott
They're made with "flash memory" chips, which, unusually for semiconductors, do actually wear out. They're usually rated in 100k erase-write cycles. On a busy SSD drive, one can do quite a lot of writes over time.

What the makers do with both the chips and the SSD devices is incorporate a percentage of spare capacity that they can switch in to replace blocks of cells that have failed or are getting tired. In practice they have to do that simply because even new devices can have faults and they need a way to work around those of they'd be binning an awful lot of product. They also try to spread the work evenly over the devices so that they don't wear out one area.
For this reason I suggest getting the biggest SSD you can afford. More space means more space to spread writes over. This is especially important in computers where it's soldered to the motherboard and can't be replaced or upgraded (looking at you Apple).

Also take a look at the TBW spec when looking for an SSD - this is "Terabyte writes" and is an indication of how many terabytes can be written to the disk before potential failure. There can be huge differences - in the 5 cheapest 2tb SSD's at my local store, they range between 640TBW and 1300TBW, meaning the 1300 will probably last more than twice as long.

Originally Posted by Gordon Scott
I've long used WD "spinning rust" drives and found them very reliable. I would expect their SSDs also to be good, but I have, I think, only the one WD SSD and it's almost new.
I've had a lot of WD stuff over the years with very few issues. All the drives in my NAS are WD Red, and I've got a bunch of Blue and Green drives as backups.

Originally Posted by Mike Halloran
not one of those MX500s ever failed to my knowledge
I have an MX100 in my 2012 Macbook that I think I've had since 2014 (in multiple computers over the years). Zero problems.

Originally Posted by Mike Halloran
I now recommend the Crucial P3+ m.2 NVMe blade over the WD/SanDisk but only because they are less expensive here. A current generation 4TB NVMe4 x4 Blue is $279 while the P3 Plus is $236. There is no difference in performance or warranty.
Except that the Blue is spec'd for between 600-900TBW while the Crucial is 440TBW.

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