Dell Lattitude 7420 eating SSDs for every meal

DLTod

I have an older Dell Lattitude 7420 as my work laptop that I use for custom integration programming. This may sound crazy but I love this computer. I like the size, feel of the keyboard, weight, and its seemingly solid feel. About 10 months ago on site, the laptop crashed for the first time ever, it rebooted but it was glitchy and the ethernet port stopped working. Then about 4 hours later it crashed again and couldn't read hard drive media. After testing I confirmed the SSD was dead. No biggie, it was a workhorse for 3 years. I replaced the SSD and all was good including the ethernet port. Last week, I needed a physical internet connection and the ethernet port was no longer working. The next day, you guessed it, the SSD was dead. I did some digging online and it appears to be a pretty common problem based on all of the articles explaining how to replace the SSD. So, is this a common problem? Why does it keep happening? Is there anything I can do to keep this from happening again?

After this last failure, I decided to get a Lenovo as a new computer but I would like to keep this as a spare for myself or other technicians, but I don't want to worry that it may be dead in the event that we really need it. It takes hours to configure a laptop for what we do. I typically use my freetime outside of work to do this so there is no downtime in the field.

Thanks!

PowerSpec_MichaelB

https://community.microcenter.com/discussion/13650/dell-lattitude-7420-eating-ssds-for-every-meal

SSDs are often very durable in terms of physical shock, but have a very finite lifespan when it comes to drive writes. If you write a ton of data to a drive, it will eventually wear down and die. That said, 3 years is still early to me. Killing a drive within 3 years would almost require writing its full capacity hundreds of times over within that timespan.

Out of curiosity, do you happen to know the brand of SSDs used? I can't think of a specific laptop setting or configuration that would prematurely kill a drive unless the controller is overheating, but you would notice the drive speed throttling long before it outright died.