Autopsying a SanDisk Extreme SSD

I was planning a backup setup and dug an old SanDisk Extreme Portable SSD out of a drawer. Plugged it in, nothing. Well, not nothing. dmesg saw a USB device. sg_inq got a polite response from the bridge chip, but the kernel logged &ldquo;Media removed, stopped polling&rdquo; and the block device reported zero bytes. The USB-to-NVMe bridge chip was alive and as chatty. The SSD behind it was gone.…