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SSDs have a secret way to protect your data when they fail
SSDs are better in basically every way when compared to HDDs except for one thing: longevity. SSDs have a limited number of write operations, and when that limit is reached, the SSD simply dies. It's not a piece of physical hardware in the same way an HDD is, and it can be a lot harder to retrieve data when it goes bad than on an HDD. However, most modern SSDs have a failsafe that will allow you to get all of your data off safe and sound when it does die, though you won't be able to use it for anything else.
Recently, a friend of mine was playing a game of War Thunder on his PC when he started to see graphical glitches come up on the screen and the audio stopped working. He tried to tab out of the game only to be met with a Blue Screen of Death error. His computer would fail to turn on after, sending him into a panic and leaving him unable to figure out what had happened. He booted up a Windows install USB and discovered through the command prompt that his files were still all there, so what happened?
4 reasons SSHDs were never a viable replacement for HDDs or SSDs
SSHDs never took off, but what happened to them? These are the reasons why.
SSDs go into a read-only state near the end of their life
You won't be able to boot from it, but you can access your data
As it turns out, SSDs are designed in a pretty smart way. Everyone knows about their limited shelf life, but it's possible to plan around that and create a system where a user can recover their data when things start to go bad. SSDs and HDDs have a system called SMART, standing for Self Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology, built-in that can identify when a drive is failing. This system uses up to 255 attributes to gauge the health of a drive, though there are typically fewer attributes applicable to SSDs, and drive manufacturers can develop and deploy their own attributes.
As an example, in Western Digital drives, SMART Attribute 16 keeps track of how many Logical Block Addresses read since the drive was in use. This attribute is not found on any other drives and is part of what Western Digital specifically uses to determine the health of its drives. Participation in SMART is voluntary, but the point is that manufacturers try to play nice with each other.
Many SSDs will use SMART to keep track of how close they are to failure, and when they cross a threshold that indicates failure is imminent, they will lock down and enter a read-only state. This means that you can't write anything to them, but it's also a clear sign to the user to get everything off of the drive while it still works. You can tell if your SSD has entered that state if you can't unlock it to write to it. Writing to an SSD is particularly stressful on it, so you might be able to read data for quite a while, but writing anything more to it could be enough to push it over a threshold where data begins to corrupt and become completely unusable.
For SSDs, read operations aren't typically stressful at all, but pushing it to the point where it goes into read-only mode really means you should take your data off of it as soon as possible. You can rest easy knowing that if your SSD fails, you'll be able to get all your data off in one piece, but be aware that it means you won't actually be able to use your PC in the meantime. You should still take frequent backups, too!
