[effie]

> Probably not best practice but how do I check the SSD is fine in the first place, especially a blank SSD?

The only way that is certain to check the memory cells is to overwrite the whole drive, flush all disk cache (power cycle the system), read all the written bytes, and check that the values read are the same as the values that have been written. This could be accomplished e.g. by setting up encryption on the whole drive on the block level (e.g. on Linux, LUKS), writing zeroes to the open (decrypted) volume, and after power cycle, opening (decrypting) the volume again and checking that all bytes read are zero.

A simpler, less reliable, but still worthy test would be to do the same, except instead of checking the read values, just throwing them away (e.g. on Linux, redirecting to /dev/null). The disk firmware should still try to read all the sectors, and if it is not lying too much, show read problems/reallocated sectors in the SMART data.