[SOLVED] Can a failing m.2 SSD damage other system components?

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xXPat

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I have two Rocket 4+ PCIe 4.0g2 M.2 SSDs installed in a system with (4) M.2 slots. Both of my existing R4+ SSDsare showing SMART errors telling me the SSDs are degraded and should be replaced. Since they contain mission-critical data, obviously my intention is to replace the critical drives immediately.

But I can put the brand new replacement R4+ in the open M.2 slot without needing to remove the existing (degraded) R4+'s alreadyinstalled. My inclination is to just leave the two degraded drives in the system and use them for scratch drives until they fail completely. Obviously I accept the risk that they will fail someday and I'll lose all the data they contain when they do.

Is there any failure mode where a degraded SSD you continue to run anyway eventually fails in a way that damages other system components? More broadly, is there any other reason NOT to ignore the SMART warnings and just keep using the old R4+'s until they fail completely? Again, I would be using them as scratch drives and not worried about data loss. Just worried about them failing in a way that breaks something else.

Thanks,
xPat

p.s. On the off chance the answer depends on the system config, this is a Dell 7760 Precision Mobile Workstation (high end laptop) with a total of 4 m.2 slots.
 
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Is there any failure mode where a degraded SSD you continue to run anyway eventually fails in a way that damages other system components? More broadly, is there any other reason NOT to ignore the SMART warnings and just keep using the old R4+'s until they fail completely?
Damage in what way?

Physically? No.
Electrically? No.
Affect the state of any other component? Unless you were overwriting a copy of the data from the drive and it was producing garbage that the destination happily accepted, no.
 
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