@Mokubai: Considering that most of the answer content is based on other answers, I've gone ahead and made the answer CW.

Well, they're different failure modes: one involves an actual inability to access data due to a specific condition (no media in drive, NAND not readable) while the other is simply an inability to write to the drive (controller blocks writes to the NAND, which is otherwise working). We generally want separate questions to be in separate posts, and combining the two might actually confuse readers.

I'll put more work into actually editing questions of this sort in the future. Thanks for chipping in.