My theory predicts that even big players will have bugs (if only due to my last point: complexity). But I insist that small players will tend to have even more bugs.

Since when has Intel been hit equally?

The "8MB bug" (https://communities.intel.com/thread/24205) was the most notorious, but I remember also some bricked Intel SSDs too.

Ignoring that, Intel is rock solid. The larger issue isn't incompetents making SSDs, but SSDs being sold soley on performance. Intel has always been a step or two behind the performance game but manages to deliver some really reliable SSD's. I have yet to see a consumer Intel fail, which is incredible as that kind of reliability, outside of the super expensive PCIe cards is unheard of.

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.

I managed to brick an Intel 320 last week. Going to see if they’ll replace it under warranty - those devices were upgraded to a 5 years so it should still be covered.

(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.)

For example, the Intel 520 and 530 series have known issues. Besides the lower performance after some amount of writes, they also tend to randomly "disappear" from the system, which is much worse. Google it, it should be easy to find many related topics.

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.)

The Intel SSD 520 and 530 use SandForce controllers, so Intel started with a big mess and spent months trying to clean it up before shipping the drives. Clearly they missed a few bugs, and they couldn't work around every mistake and design limitation in the controller's hardware.

Intel's in-house designs have an extremely good track record. I'm only aware of two major bugs.

We saw some performance issues with Intel's DC S3500 firmware. But they were able to fix them without too much hassle.