I think we're a few more years of shaking out this industry and leaving behind all the growing pains. No idea who will be left standing, but I suspect Intel will probably be around.
(Apparently the drive really didn’t like being issued with an 'hdparm --security-set-pass X /dev/sdb' command. I was intending to do a secure wipe, for which the password setting is a pre-requisite, but the drive never came back from setting the password. After that it just returned junk data to any command, including 'hdparm -I /dev/sdb' & failed the power-on BIOS SMART test.)
I don't know if this only affects the SATA SSDs or not, but it happens a lot. (BTW, the random disappearing also affects some other SSDs from other brands.)
Intel's in-house designs have an extremely good track record. I'm only aware of two major bugs.
There used to be something like one hundred car manufacturers in the USA, around a century ago!
Another way to look at oligopolies is they no longer need to compete on quality or specs if they slack in unison, and the collapse and commodification of their product means they'll get nickel and dimed to death so I wouldn't expect perfection from them, they find ways to screw up. You can't "wish" or "push" commodity status on a market if mother nature and the economy in general prevent it from happening, forcing commodity style management onto a non-commodity product/market just makes a mess.
Something _horrible_ happened on the 3TB Seagate batch. 4TB and 2TB are reasonable... but 3TB... wtf happened?
Manufacturers could then eventually converge all of their development and QA efforts on a few different codebases designed for different tradeoffs rather than everybody rolling their own thing and learning everybody else's lessons the hard way.
But I guess as long as custom firmware remains a major competitive advantage, this would never happen.
Do you have intimate knowledge of the firmware writing process for hard drive manufacturing? Do you think knobs aren't twisted and codebases aren't rewritten to take into account the changes required for the latest in magnetic storage? Geometry calculations for perpendicular and shingled media is less complicated than a flash translation layer? Also just because something is old and hasn't broken yet, doesn't mean it's well written, bug free or will work in the future. This isn't to say that hard drives are reliable, as they're notoriously the least reliable thing in your computer.
If you take the platters out of one hard disk and put it into another hard disk with different firmware, the other hard disk PCB won't be able to read it or write to it. I found this out by having a dead Hitachi drive (yes, the IBM "Deathstar" disks after they were sold to Hitachi) so I bought another identical drive and swapped PCBs but on startup the read/write head would not settle as there was a mismatch between the PCB firmware number and the firmware identifier written on the start of the disk. So, although I thought they were identical disks they were not.
But with traditional HDDs, the amount of engineering and domain-specific knowledge to manufacture and assemble the platters, moving heads, casing, etc, is such that there are only a handful of companies around the world who can do this (Seagate, WDC, Hitachi, etc). They have decades of experience doing that, so the firmware part of HDDs happen to be very robust as these companies have seen everything that can and will go wrong in an HDD.
So it boils down to this: which would you trust more, an HDD firmware code base that is 20 years old, or an SSD firmware code base that is 4 years old?
Combine this with the fact SSD firmware is much more complex (a flash translation layer must minimize write amplification, do wear leveling, spread writes on multiple chips, etc), and you are guaranteed that many SSDs on the market are going to be very buggy.