Around 3 years ago a family friend had their PC’s PSU and subsequently their Crucial M500 SSD and possibly motherboard get damaged during a power surge (we found out the PC was plugged into just an unprotected power strip), though the M500 locked itself into read-only mode since, as I later confirmed, it’s definitely been damaged (it’ll actually lose connection if you even just try to read from certain sectors).
Since storms and the like were quite active that week, I had the idea to power two of my own working SATA SSDs and their own damaged SATA SSD from a battery bank since, while I have surge protectors, I don’t have an uninterruptible power supply.
Initially it worked, but I made the hard discovery that, of the two power ports on the battery bank, only one of the ports put out 2 amps - the other only put out 1 amp! And it was just my luck that I had two of the three SSDs connected to that 1 amp port which means that it then locked up once I tried actually doing some things with them.
After rebooting and biting the bullet to connect my SSDs straight to the power supply (though I may have waited a bit for the storms to pass some?), I discovered that my previously-working M550 (not a typo - don’t confuse it for the family friends’ M500) locked itself into a read-only mode in exactly the same way that my family friends’ M500 did.
Thing is though, I was still able to do a secure erase and even upgrade/downgrade the firmware on the M550, yet it continues to be locked to read-only. When I contacted Crucial, they confirmed that it is not designed to be unlocked by the end-user.
Furthermore, I actually have a semi-borky Crucial M4 that, in a completely seperate incident, crashed after also not having enough power (protip: the front USB ports on 15-year PCs don’t always put out enough amperage to handle SATA-USB adapters!). However, because the M4 predates the automatic read-only lock that Crucial added beginning with the M500, I was able to “recover” that M4 easily by just leaving it plugged in only to power for an hour, leaving it unplugged for an hour, and then it “just worked”. So I have little to no reason to believe that this isn’t basically the same thing that occurred on my M550 as well, except that the M550 is locked to read-only.
Oh and, to be clear, Windows vs Linux makes no difference - in fact, Windows gets really unhappy with the locked-to-read-only M550, but Linux can see it without any issue.