[farawayea]

Yes, you can. Can you boot them from external drives when their internal SSD is dead? This isn't about booting them when their OS is wiped out.

Having a dead SSD seems to kill these computers. That's expected for something with soldered flash chips.

[xenospn]

I’ve owned Macs for decades and never had an internal drive die, SSD or not. And I’ve worked in the HPC storage industry for years. My expert opinion is that you’re making up reasons why this is bad.