I've had a lot of nvme form factor drives (whether in a usb stick or das or on my motherboard) fail in the last 5 years.
I assume heat. I have one of the fastest 2tb usb sticks you can get and it gets super hot in the aluminum case its in and that drive only lasted me a year. My tiny little 2tb only-used-for-time-machine drive i bought with my m1 max died years ago. I have a $1200 (now) msrp 4tb wd black i used for a month before it completely died. I don't think i have a single working usb stick right now out of probably 5 of them.
I have 4-6 samsung 970-990 pros none of those have died.
I had a 1TB Samsung 9xx Pro fail on me in a Windows 10 PC. One day the PC wouldn't boot, said there wasn't a hard drive there. I put the drive in an external USB 3 case and with Linux, I could dd from the drive, but it was running really hot and had an unusual access pattern: it would run for about 5 seconds and then pause for 30 seconds. I think the pauses are what screwed up the Windows boot because it wasn't waiting long enough for the drive to respond. I eventually did get the drive copied w/o data loss, though it exceeded even Linux's timeouts a few times during the copy and I had to restart dd with an offset to get the whole thing copied.
I assume heat. I have one of the fastest 2tb usb sticks you can get and it gets super hot in the aluminum case its in and that drive only lasted me a year. My tiny little 2tb only-used-for-time-machine drive i bought with my m1 max died years ago. I have a $1200 (now) msrp 4tb wd black i used for a month before it completely died. I don't think i have a single working usb stick right now out of probably 5 of them.
I have 4-6 samsung 970-990 pros none of those have died.