[bradleyland]

Is that really the general assumption, or is it the assumption amongst people who know enough about hardware to build their own systems? Plenty of system integrators (Dell, Apple, etc) sell configurations that are SSD-only. If the failure rates are really this high, it's a point of concern to say the least.

I keep regular Time Machine backups, Backblaze off-site backups, and much of my "current" work is done in Dropbox, so it's synched quickly, but a hard drive loss still means downtime and the loss of whatever I was working on. Of all the computing users I know in every day life, I am the most backed up amongst them. SSDs are rapidly going mainstream, and the impact of hardware failure for the "mainstream" user isn't something that should be marginalized.