I recall hearing of similar failures early on. I don't recall the brand. Apparently the controller goes bad and it just stops responding to SATA commands.

Intel had a strategy that caused them to go into read only mode once they reached their rated lifetime write capacity. All data remained available until they were power cycled whereupon they would intentionally brick themselves.

In my case it is was a Crucial M4. It still tries to operate but will fail the long SMART self test.