This comment by the author I think tends to support my theory that most of the failures seen are firmware related (and not due to actual hardware failures, which as I mentioned in the previous thread are very rare and should occur roughly equally often in hard drives as SSDs) :
As we explained in the article, write endurance is a spec'ed failure. That won't happen in the first year, even at enterprise level use. That has nothing to do with our data. We're interested in random failures. The stuff people have been complaining about... BSODs with OCZ drives, LPM stuff with m4s, the SSD 320 problem that makes capacity disappear... etc... Mostly "soft" errors. Any hard error that occurs is subject to the "defective parts per million" problem that any electrical component also suffers from.
and from the main article body:
Firmware is the most significant, and we see its impact in play almost every time an SSD problem is reported.
(Hard drives also suffer from firmware bugs of course)
I think I'm generally encouraged by this article because it suggests that once the firmware bugs are fixed (or if you buy from a vendor less likely to ship with bugs in the first place), then SSD reliability will be much better than it is perceived to be today.
