My first (Intel X-25) SSD went from working fine to not being able to read _anything_ from it, at all, in 10 minutes - after having worked great for 1½ years.

My first (Intel X-25) SSD went from working fine to not being able to read _anything_ from it, at all, in 10 minutes - after having worked great for 1½ years. It is still worth it, but I have never experienced a failure mode like that with harddisks. Usually you can get most of the data off of them when you start getting errors.