The main takeaway for me from this is less around the reliability of individual drives, but that SSDs as a whole have moved into a space where I don't really need to worry about them being signifiantly less reliable than hard drives.
For example, the author doesn't even bother to gloss over key reliability parameters such as data retention, which is primarily impacted by cycling.
(By data retention, I mean the ability of drive to retain written data over a period of time, such as 6 months, since written. This is usually accelerated in testing by a bake cycle.)
That said, it's a fun read and I'm glad there's more exposure on this topic.
My Macbook's SSD died in a blaze of reallocated sectors and write failures just last week, and that thing was just around 2 years old.
For comparison, I've only had 2 spinning hard drives fail on me (I've owned around 25), and those were >10 years old and mostly decommissioned.
It could be a statistical fluke, and the sheer speed of SSDs means that even now, a higher failure rate is acceptable, but SSDs in general don't have the longevity of older magnetic hard drives.
The majority of SSD reliability problems never had anything do with flash endurance. You can tell this from the failure mode too: all the data disappears. Instead, they are caused by firmware and design bugs that cause occasional corruption of the FTL internals.
Regular benchmark-style IO patterns aren't a good way to tickle these bugs so the endurance test doesn't really say anything about this main problem.
As a message to the marketing people I excluded in the above paragraph, I would be willing to pay a modest amount extra money to have the honest foundry name on the marketing material for a drive, and lets be honest I'm only going to buy multiple quantities of your product if I can order from separate foundries so please don't lie and also please give each foundry a different UPC code or something. Somehow I get the feeling this will end up like power supplies where "everyone knows" there is one model of supply and stacks of different wattage stickers applied to the same device to maximize revenue. The market is too corrupt and unequally informed for this to happen. Still, a guy can dream.
Larger cross-batch samples is absolutely a good idea, but the dig at SSD's applies just as much to regular harddrives.
[For those who don't know, DeathStar was a nickname given to the IBM DeskStar line of harddrives after one of the models had a problem that gave them high odds of catastrophic head crashes - so bad in fact that they'd strip most of the magnetic material off the glass platters when they crashed[1] -; out of 10 IBM DeskStar drives we had at the time, all 10 failed within a week or two of each other, under a year after we bought them. The problem was is often considered to be one of the main reasons why IBM unloaded their hard drive business to Hitachi]
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HGST_Deskstar#mediaviewer/File:...
The problem was is often considered to be one of the main
reasons why IBM unloaded their hard drive business to
Hitachi
[1] https://www.backblaze.com/blog/hard-drive-reliability-update...