SSD issues

I’m dealing with a Samsung T7 SSD that just—for reasons known only to the universe—decided to quit on me. It was running my macOS installation, and then suddenly, nothing. Total silence. When I plug it into my laptop via an external cable, the drive actually shows up and I can see the partitions, but the second I try to format it or do anything useful, the whole screen freezes up. I end up having to kill the process in Task Manager just to get my computer back. What am I looking at here before I just toss this thing in the trash?

Once an SSD dies, it’s dead. If you can't even get an installation running on it, just toss it straight into the trash can

Grab yourself HD Tune Pro or some other diagnostic tool and run a full scan for bad sectors; if you start seeing red, that SSD is basically headed straight for the landfill. If you want to go the DIY route instead, just fire up the command prompt and run this to check both the physical sectors and the overall integrity of your file system:

chkdsk c: /r (use c: or whatever drive letter your SSD actually uses)

You can dig deeper into how that works here:
https://neosmart.net/wiki/chkdsk/

or maybe this:

https://mashtips.com/ssd-health-test...monitor-tools/