It couldn't be seen in the bios of the desktop it was in as a main drive. But I put it in a powered docking station and it will for anywhere between 5 seconds and 3 minutes, then it goes invisible again. so it's not dead, and the data is still in tact. i just can't keep it open long enough to retrieve the data. any ideas?

The question is too general. Can be nearly everything from bad soldering and drive processor overheating to memory issues. Sometimes capacitors can go bad as well.

And I'd suggest to withdraw from powering the drive on/off. We have had a four SSD drives RAID recovery recently and two of them were still alive when the client pulled the drives out. Few power cycles were enough to get four dead SSDs instead of two.

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powering up and down doesn't seem to be an issue since it's controlled in a docking station. it seems the drive will keep going as long a constant data stream is going to or from it. next step is the rma now that the data was recovered. i'd venture the guess that it's a bad voltage spike protector.