Thanks for the extra references! I'll make sure to bookmark those and take a closer look later.

Yeah, MLC already losing data after 3 months doesn't really surprise me that much. If you play with a raw MLC chip and turn off the ECC engine, the amount of bit flips you get from reading on some chips isn't even funny anymore. With one chip I tried, even with ECC, I managed to induce persistent bit flips fairly quickly just by reading the same physical page over-and-over. For extra fun: those bit flips can happen in another page that you didn't touch, because the bits are paired :-)

What actually still does surprise me sometimes, is how reliable those things can work after all, if you just pile enough software abstraction and management on top.