MBP SSD in OWC enclosure: trash or recoverable?

[Makosuke]

Background: Helped someone I know upgrade the SSD in a 2013 MBP. I ended up with the old 250GB SSD. The pulled Apple SSD got installed and used, briefly, in one of those piece-of-junk $15 USB adapter boards off Amazon. Started throwing errors after a short period of time.

I eventually got my hands on an OWC Envoy Pro enclosure for this specific model of Apple drive in order to find out whether it was the garbage adapter that died, or if it bricked the relatively nice SSD.

Looks like the latter, but I just wanted to make sure there aren't any tricks I'm overlooking before I throw the drive in the trash.

Installed in the Envoy Pro the drive and partition map is recognized by both a Mac and Windows, although it doesn't mount:

Unfortunately, when I try to erase it with Disk Utility (macOS 11 or 12), the erase fails with "Couldn't modify partition map. : (-69874)". Same error if I try to repartition it.

If I try to repair it with Disk Utility, I get "File system verify or repair failed. : (-69845)"

If I try to convert it to AFPS I get the unhelpful "An internal error has occurred."

The Disk Management service in Windows 10 also recognizes the drive and shows the three partitions you'd expect on a former Mac boot drive. However, attempting to erase or modify them results in the drive activity light flashing for about a minute before Disk Management says that the drive is no longer available and it vanishes entirely (unless disconnected then reconnected).

As noted above, I'm assuming that the sketchy Amazon adapter was of the quality you'd expect and bricked the drive, but figured it doesn't hurt to ask if there's any clever recovery tricks I've overlooked.

Anything else I should try?

 

[Slartibart]

Did you try to check the SSD health state using smartmontools?

 

[Makosuke]

Did you try to check the SSD health state using smartmontools?

Thanks for the suggestion. The S.M.A.R.T. status all shows good (through DriveDx since the smartmontools domain seems to have lapsed):

Model Family                         : Apple (SanDisk-based) SSDs
Model                                : APPLE SSD SD256E
Form Factor                          : 1.8 inches
Firmware Version                     : 1021AP
Drive Type                           : SSD

Power On Time                        : 6,980 hours (9 months 20 days 20 hours)
Power Cycles Count                   : 45,680
Current Power Cycle Time             : 0.3 hours

S.M.A.R.T. support enabled           : yes

ID  NAME                                         RAW VALUE                  STATUS
  5 Retired Block Count                          0                          100% OK
173 Wear Leveling Count                          0x201130058                91.0% OK
192 Unsafe Shutdown Count                        67                         100% OK
197 Current Pending Block Count                  0                          100% OK
199 UDMA CRC Error Count                         0                          100% OK

I forgot to add before that some operations generate the error:

Unable to write to the last block of the device. : (-69760)

And if I tell SoftRAID to zero the first and last 100 sectors (or any other non-passive operation), it eventually gives an error to the effect that the drive stopped responding when a write was attempted.

Basically the drive is reporting that everything is fine, but refuses to allow any data to be written. Which is probably evidence that it's bricked, unless there's some boot-drive-level hidden lock that I'm unaware of.