Thanks all for your feedback. I did also note that the warranty on a 500Gb Samsung SSD is only 300 TBW while it is 600 TBW for a 1TB so I swapped the two 500 Gb's for a 1TB Samsung EVO. Fitted it last night and the installation was fine with this drive. There are no reported errors in crystal disk info either. I know I probably fell unlucky with the bad Cruicial drive but I will stick with Samsung from now on.
As an interesting side note, I have always had a good experience with HDD's with the exception of a bad batch in about 2013 when the HDD factories were destroyed in Thailand and so they had to switch production - if anyone remembers that? I even have a Seagate laptop drive with close to 40k hours on it! I had to swap it out for another not because there was anything wrong with it but I felt like I was really pushing my luck. When I plug it back in now, it still reports zero problems though!
As an interesting side note, I have always had a good experience with HDD's with the exception of a bad batch in about 2013 when the HDD factories were destroyed in Thailand and so they had to switch production - if anyone remembers that? I even have a Seagate laptop drive with close to 40k hours on it! I had to swap it out for another not because there was anything wrong with it but I felt like I was really pushing my luck. When I plug it back in now, it still reports zero problems though!