oh my god i cant believe this is how i find out why my computer has been so incredibly slow
THIS IS THE FUCKING REASON
SHIT EXISTS EXCLUSIVELY TO BAMBOOZLE AND BEFUDDLE PEOPLE WHO THOUGHT THEY HAD MADE THE RIGHT CHOICE BECAUSE EVERYTHING'S LABELED THE FUCKING SAME
IF THEY WORKED RIGHT WITHOUT DRAM NONE OF THEM WOULD HAVE IT
you want my politics? "there is exactly one correct way to make every product and anything else is fraud."
Mechanical hard drives, SSDs, even SD cards, are all little computers. They have to be, because storage has been pushed to the point where none of these mediums are reliable as-is. Flash needs it's use spread out, and typically also does things like treating cells as SLC until space fills up, then switching to multi level. Mechanical drives are constantly fighting keeping all of the little magic fields in place and happy, even running self tests when nothing is going on.
In most situations, they refuse to tell the host system about any of this. At best you get "hey something fucked up!", but usually you have to ask for things like "hey how many sectors have you reallocated?" and even then you don't get detailed info like say, where those sectors were. And of course, sometimes they fuck up and they don't know it happened.
All of this is why you should not trust any single storage device.
You need more than one, and you need to know if any of them are telling porky pies.