hardware failure - Are SSD's really reliable enough for power users?

TL;DR (though please read my full experience before jumping in with a quick answer.)

A power user performs a certain amount of write cycles. Does an MLC SSD drive support enough write cycles to last a power user around 5 years of usage. In my first experience with an SSD, it became cranky after just nine months. Based on my usage patterns, is this normal for an SSD or was it just a dud?

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About nine months ago I bought an SSD (a 60GB OCZ Vertex Turbo). Up until about two weeks ago, I really loved the drive. It was extremely reliable and it really did make my system much more responsive. But two weeks ago, the drive started failing. It took me about 1½ weeks just to pinpoint the exact problem, and in the last few days it just got progressively worse. The drive has been taken back to the shop.

During these last two weeks I've done considerable research on MLC based SSDs and to be frank, I have huge doubts about the technology. What I would like to know is whether my concerns are warranted, or did I just get a dud drive?

You can reply per point if you like:

1. Getting bad sectors on an SSD is just a matter of time, and bad sectors develop quick. It seems the software driver controller is responsible for keeping a log of these bad sectors and avoiding the use thereof.


2. Within 9 months of usage I developed enough bad sectors to make the controller really work to find sectors it could still use.


3. The controller isn't perfect, and once you've got a certain amount of bad sectors, you'll have an extremely unstable and insecure computing experience.


4. It’s not easy to pinpoint the exact cause of your system crashes.


5. I was using my SSD as a boot drive. I had vitals installed and other development tools, I also installed Sharepoint 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2 Express. Besides this I had Visual Studio and Outlook. At no time did I copy huge movie or iso images or games to the SSD. Any non vital apps were kept on a regular hdd drive.


6. I completely did apply tweaks such as turning off system restore, and I NEVER defragged SSD.


7. I never turn my system off, unless I need to restart. Having said this, my system does enter standby mode when not in use.


8. I was running Windows 7 64bit with trim enabled.


9. I ran an anti-virus app.

Do you think if you're a demanding power user, you simply go through too many write cycles for an SSD to last more than around 9 months?

Answer

An Intel presentation we saw said that the SLC based SSD drives were recommended for heavy database and file usage. They are much, much more expensive, and designed for things like SANs... We use SQL express pretty heavily as well, on most of our laptops, and went with the MLC based ones.

We went with the X-25m's in about 4,000 laptops. We have had a few issues, some fixed by a firmware update.. others that were just bad drives.. but really, we are looking at about 1%-2% higher error rate than what we saw with the standard 7200rpm laptop drives. When you figure in the power, weight, and especially speed savings (we went from a 10 minute boot with XP and 7200rpm laptop drives because of all sorts of drivers and software and AV, to a 2 min boot with Win7 and an SSD) we would still choose the SSD's every day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

We had all sorts of HD's die for all sorts of reasons.. (when you have that many laptops, a 2% error rate means about 80 drives per year!) A good backup is critical, no matter what drive technology you use..