Where are all the dates in this article? When were these drives purchased/manufactured?
Some (all?) of the 320 drives (pre-2012) had a bug that basically bricked the drive after power loss. See more on google at '8mb bug' and this Intel thread [1]. The existence of this bug, the well-known reliability reputation of Intel, and the sheer size of this sampling number (N=500?) make the distinction in time important. Were all these drives more recent, or is the Intel failure rate, even with buggy firmware, still ~.5% ?
>However, given that deployment of over 500 Intel 320 SSDs has been carried out and only 3 failures observed over several years, it would be reasonable to conclude that Intel S3500s could be trusted long-term as well