Was the SSD made by OCZ or had a Sandforce controller by any chance?
Also anecdotal, but my 160GB Intel X25-M 'G2' has been working perfectly for the past 5 years and 10 months. So far I have written 16.92 TBs to it [1] and until I moved the drive into another PC I had been running games and VMs from it.
The page may look like there are many steps involved, but actually many do not apply to recent distributions. It's more or less a 4-5 steps for a recent distro. hardly what I would call "a lot of fiddly work".
The thing is, the linked article is a grab bag of outdated (mount filesystems with noatime [0]) or just plain wrong (btrfs is bad for SSDs) factoids and bits of advice. It's clear that the author hasn't gone to the trouble to fact or efficacy check most of his assertions. We need fewer top-ten lists of cargo-cult suggestions to extend the life of your PC, not more. :)
What's more, you're going to pains -however small- to extend the life of something that will easily last for far more than five years. Five years is a long time in the SSD market. My ~five year old 100GB SSD is still going strong. It cost ~$400 when I purchased it. Today I can spend ~$400 and get a 1TB drive that's substantially faster than and at least as reliable as this one.
There's something to be said for frugality. I know: I've been using the same laptop for the past eight years. There's also something to be said about not worrying about wear when using highly durable tools that are designed to last for a decade or more. [1]
[0] relatime has been available since ~2007 and was made a part of the defaults mount option since ~2009.
[1] After all, if a tool lasts for ten years, you'll only ever buy ten of them in your lifetime.
People Who Know in the industry know that any non-bottom-of-the-barrel SSD bought in the last -like- five years or so will endure many tens of TBs of writes.
If we look at Tech Report's SSD Torture Test [0], we know with some confidence that consumer-level SSDs will endure hundreds of TBs of writes before failing.
To provide some perspective for those numbers: My Linux laptop has encrypted swap, btrfs root partiton, and encrypted btrfs /home all on the SSD, and sees frequent compiles-from-source (I run Gentoo Linux.). Other than mounting my filesystems with the "discard" option, I've performed no SSD-specific configuration step or fiddled with any VM tunables.
Under this workload and configuration, I have written 20.4TB and read 66.8TB over 3.9 years. SMART indicates that zero blocks have been reallocated and that the drive is in perfect health.
In short, if you've a consumer or developer's workload, don't worry about SSD media longevity. Regardless of who you are, strongly consider benchmarking any configuration tweaks that folks claim will improve performance.
[0] http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experim... (But make sure to also check out the intro article: http://techreport.com/review/24841/introducing-the-ssd-endur... )