Question Is my SSD toasted or did a bad SATA cable make it appear that way?

[eeprom]

I have a 2TB 2.5" Crucial MX500 that was giving me read errors in the Linux kernel log (READ FPMA QUEUED errors) and eventually stopped showing it's partition table. I read that these errors are often caused by a faulty SATA cable, so I tried different SATA cables but still got the same errors. This led me to believe the disk was bad, so I managed to recover what data I had on it with the testdisk utility and then issued an ATA secure erase command so that I could return it to the store without sharing whatever info was on it. However, since I issued the secure erase command, the read errors have completely disappeared, and the disk seems to be working as good as new. Is it possible that a bad SATA cable led to some internal corruption of the controller or something such that read errors continued to manifest even after switching to a good SATA cable, but the ATA secure erase function somehow reset that internal corruption and now I have a perfectly good disk? The disk never showed any SMART errors, even when I had it connected by the allegedly faulty SATA cable.

 

[fzabkar]

The latest version of the MX500 (with SM2259 controller) appears to be problematic.

Tip: Using CrystalDiskInfo to identify controller & NAND:

https://www.hddoracle.com/viewtopic.php?p=22539#p22539