[AngryParsley]

That study is Intel-only, but it seems to jive with the return rates Anandtech mentioned: http://www.anandtech.com/show/4202/the-intel-ssd-510-review/...

There are also numbers for hard drives: http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2147063

Basically, Intel SSDs from a year ago are more reliable than all hard drives. And SSDs in general are more reliable than any 2TB hard drive.

The data isn't ideal, but it's better than anecdotes. Return rates should correlate pretty well with failure rates. If anything, return rates should favor hard drives, since people are less likely to return a faulty cheap hard drive than a faulty expensive SSD.

[cs702]

AngryParsley: the Tom's Hardware article wazoox mentioned above also has those return-rate stats (page 3): "...returns can occur for a multitude of reasons. This presents a challenge because we don’t have any additional information on the returned drives—were they dead-on-arrival, did they stop working over time, or was there simply an incompatibility that prevented the customer from using the [device]? ... If online purchases account for the majority of hard drives sold, poor packaging and carrier mishandling can have a real effect on return rates. Furthermore, we also have no way of normalizing how customers used these drives. The large variance in hard drive return rates [between data sets] underlines this problem. For example, the Seagate Barracuda LP rises from 2.1% to 4.1%, while the Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EARS drops from 2.4% to 1.2%..."[1]

In short, the available return-rate data is too noisy and inconsistent to be a good proxy for failure rates.

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-...