Silicon Power SSD S55 Gone Burst After 4 Years

 Bought this Silicon Power Sata SSD 480GB in March of 2018. Yesterday, Feb 2 2022 it went kaput.

Silicon Power 480GB SSD 3D NAND S55 TLC 7mm

 It replaced an internal rotating drive in my Intel 2012 Mac Mini. The Mini is in use all day everyday from light to mild use in terms of data read/written. And a few weeks in the year it's put to heavy use. I have no idea how much that represents in terms of data size R/W unfortunately.

 In any case this is a SHORT lifespan for a SSD. Granted in was one of the cheapest back when I bought it, and SP have not won the price for reliability of their products that's for sure.

 Lesson: ALWAYS HAVE AN UP TO DATE BACKUP OF YOUR DATA. Best of course is to have several copies, but at least have one. I had an up to date clone (and a copy from last month) of the entire Mac mini Boot drive made with CCC. It has saved my bacon more than once.

 Now for the sequence of events: I noticed the Mac slowing down for a few weeks before, was getting the beach ball while on Safari or doing mundane actions. Didn't pay too much attention to it, only I made sure my clone was up to date. Left the clone drive attached and CCC to backup everyday.

In the morning this message popped from Adobe Creative Cloud:

"Adobe Creative Cloud is needed to resolve this problem. However it is missing or damaged."

Couldn't do a screen grab as you can see, as everything was slow like molasses. OK, so red alert ensued. I restarted from an external USB Mojave Boot Installer, fired Disk Utility and First Aid, which found the fsroot tree invalid and could not repair it. (The SSD was formatted APFS.) I tried a few times, same results, no go.

I tried to re-install Mojave to no avail. The installation would hang in the middle and not go through. I tried to erase the SSD and do a clean install, that failed as well.

Install frozen and not going anywhere.

I then decided to install a clean Mojave onto a new external SSD. I booted again from the USB Installer and that worked. The installation went through and I was able to start from the external SSD.

Only when I ran Software Update, it got stuck in the middle of the update and did not complete it. I restarted, tried again, left the Mac alone for hours, same deal, no go.

Finally I removed the bad internal SP SSD from the belly of the beast, replaced it with the external SSD with the fresh Mojave OS, booted, and OFF IT WENT! It proceeded with the update like a champ and finally the Mini was working again!

All I had to do was to bring back all the data I needed from the clone copy.

Afterwards I tried to Erase the SP SSD several times as an external drive, and after many long minutes, Disk Utility just could not complete the erase. So this drive is officially RIP.

4 years of use. Not a whole lot.