And here we see the main problem with how SSD dies.
Just to stop my eye from twitching while reading this thread, I need to correct some things.
The old Atari consoles used EPROMS which is more like your BIOS chips, and has to be totally rewritten each time.
IDE/ATA, EIDE, SATA, SCSI are connection protocols, and any magnetic disc, tape drive, Solid State Device or optical drive can be made to use any of those.
You can have an IDE SSD.
Even though SSD tech keeps improving each time it does they push it too far yet again, so the drives are always on the edge of what is practical.
Hybrid drives are the best solution. A combination of both.
If you have proper PC in a big box, you can fit 2 drives anyway.
Use the SSD only for OS and programs that are fairly static (do not update often).
Change all temp storage to the second classic drive.
That includes Windows TEMP and the User Temp and every downloader or browser you use.
Another common option is to use a chunk of your RAM as a RAM Disc, and use that for TEMP data.
Disable the Indexing service and NTFS last access updates (Cacheman does this for you)
Always get the manufactures SSD tool and see if it has Overprovision/Wear Leveling and automatic trimming.
If so enable them.
Auslogic defrag has some very handy SSD optimisation tweeks, so is worth using even if you don't defrag.
SMART monitoring as mentioned in the first post is very important, right from day 1 of using your drive.
If the SMART info you see does not mean much to you, install Almico Speedfan (small and free) and use the advanced drive info button. It will show a web page that explains the data and compares your drive with others so you can see if yours is good, bad or average. The pages can be shared so you can get advice from other people.
My XP boot drive
My external Seagate with problems
HD tools like
Spinrite have been known to resurrect dead SSDs, because they ignore what SMART is saying and try to reset each block anyway.
At this point you have no choice but to brute force them back into working.
HDD Regenerator is the only real alternative
MHDD is free and can also refresh blocks
It is also available on the "Ultimate Boot CD" which should already be in everyone's tool set.