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
That bug was not as prominent as you make it sound - I was unable to reproduce the issue (or any other issue) across tens of thousands of reboots on the buggy firmware (running Linux and a quality SAS HBA.) The circumstances to produce a corruption were much more rare than simply "power loss," and many users with "safe" platforms could easily expect 0.5% AFR.
Even with "risky" OS and controller combinations, there was an element of probability involved, so most (probably almost all) power loss events would not hit the bug.
Plus the SSD320 was difficult to obtain back then, and reasonable operators upgraded to the firmware version with this bug fixed, so only a small percentage of the units were ever even vulnerable.
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
[1] https://communities.intel.com/message/133499