Given the power dynamic between a single customer and large corporations, the smart thing to do is to assume malice until prove otherwise. This puts the onus on the corporations and, if we're lucky, creates an environment where they compete with each other to be seen as the most honest. The worst thing that happens is the single customer has to buy an SSD from someone they don't trust.
If we do the opposite, as you say, and assume everything is an honest mistake, that puts pressure on the single customer to prove that the organization with a huge marketing budget is doing something wrong. In this situation, the worst thing that happens is we all get taken advantage of.
Our collective distrust is the only power we have against massive marketing/PR budgets. It doesn't have to be angry, or sour, or cranky, we just collectively need to not take their word until we have a reason to do so.
Considering immoral practices adopted by corporations, such as vendor lock-in, use of slave work (directly or indirectly), law bending for its own interests, supporting and conducting biased research towards its own interests among others, I would say that is quite sensible to believe it. Big corporations, per se, are not evil entities. The people running them might or might not be, and when you have evil/immoral people running things, unless there are good control measures in place, they might take bad decisions.
If a spinning rust can run for ~8 years without any problems,a consumer SSD can hit beyond 40K hours reliably, and everything is checked and tested tens of times because of the complexity of flash storage, I'd get suspicious too.
Also, enterprise drives get firmware updates (regardless of spinning or not), and this firmware is automatically applied via RAID controller, so it could be remedied easily before it got this big if it's an actual error.
In some cases, but a product must fulfill its core purpose. If a SSD intentionally dumped data and self destructed at a set time, that would be disastrous for the brand. Same way a car doesn't adopt planned obsolescence by blowing up after 200k miles.
> If a SSD intentionally dumped data and self destructed at a set time, that would be disastrous for the brand.
Other than "intentionally" (which we cannot know and makes no difference to whether you lose your data or not) that is literally what these SSDs are doing, and no SSD brand has been destroyed over it.
What more could a manufacturer do to be "disastrous for the brand" than literally build an ssd that stops working after 40kh? Because this does not seem to qualify for you
If we do the opposite, as you say, and assume everything is an honest mistake, that puts pressure on the single customer to prove that the organization with a huge marketing budget is doing something wrong. In this situation, the worst thing that happens is we all get taken advantage of.
Our collective distrust is the only power we have against massive marketing/PR budgets. It doesn't have to be angry, or sour, or cranky, we just collectively need to not take their word until we have a reason to do so.