Failed: VAVA Portable SSD Touch 1TB (Maxio MAS0902A + Micron 29F2T08EMLCE)

Back in 2022, I decided to buy a pair of 1TB VAVA Portable SSDs for a pretty decent price. I cared little for brands, when it came to solid-state drives, since most vendors weren’t making the controllers or NAND themselves, so what mattered most was what was inside. For my <AU$100, I was getting Micron TLC-based NAND with an average, but common and serviceable Maxio MAS0902A DRAM-less controller in a nice USB enclosure with a SATA bridge. I wished it was NVMe, but beggars can’t be choosers. On the whole, the two drives served well, except when one drive developed one uncorrectable sector on a data recovery job, making my life more painful than it had to be as I was chasing a deadline. That drive has since become the scratch SSD on which all my blog content “in-progress” resides and some of my smaller backups do as well. The other has been a holiday SSD which I take along with me to record a secondary back-up of my photos and collected experimental data. Just three days before my…