One thing the reported averages already show, which is more about reliability stats in general than about Flash, is that the average write cycles survived is wa

One thing the reported averages already show, which is more about reliability stats in general than about Flash, is that the average write cycles survived is way higher than, say, the cycle count after which you'd see 5% of devices fail. These endurance tests aren't testing retention much at all; they answer the question "how many cycles can the flash go through before it can't hold data for the very short amount of time it takes to read it back again on the next pass", which is not surprisingly much higher than e.g. the number of cycles before which the data will disappear after 3 months. The cells can be so worn and leaky they erase themselves within a few hours, but as long as that's more time than it takes until the data is read back, this test will still consider that successful.