Well, I had an ASUS Haswell laptop (my most expensive laptop I’ve ever splurged on. Probably won’t ever pay this much for a laptop again) with a Hitachi HDD. After several years of Win10 thrashing it (12GB RAM and it took at least 10 minutes for disk activity to cease when it was booted), the HDD developed some bad sectors. I was able to “fix” those with HDD Regenerator but they kept coming back, forcing me to run that software for hours for a full surface scan. So I had to get it replaced. Bought Samsung 860 EVO SSD and cloned the HDD on that without issue. But then I looked underneath the laptop and I didn’t have a screwdriver for the stupid uncommon screws they used. I put the SSD away and got busy with life.
In the mean time, I kept using the laptop like that fixing the bad sectors until six months later, a bad sector developed near the boot volume that would prevent Windows from booting. It would still work after fixing but now things are wayyyyyyyyyyyyyy too serious for me to ignore. So I order the screwdriver and get the HDD replaced with the 860 EVO. Everything seems to be working fine on first boot. Then suddenly I notice some sluggishness. Check in Task Manager and disk activity is really high. Open My Computer and notice that the free space on Drive C is increasing fast! Within a minute or two, I receive some fatal Windows error (some critical file not found) and then probably a BSOD. Reboot and Windows won’t boot anymore. The HDD had gotten into such a sensitive state that I didn’t want to risk killing it from the burden of another clone attempt and a lot of my data on Drive D was still intact on the Samsung SSD. So I left it like that and had to switch to an Ivy Bridge laptop which I’m using to this day.
Maybe that incident happened for a good reason (that laptop could be upgraded to max 24GB RAM while my Ivy Bridge Thinkpad now has 32GB RAM) but I still cannot trust Samsung SSD serving as a critical boot drive. All the personal PC’s I’ve built since do not contain a Samsung SSD and probably never will.