My experience as we use SSDs for our embedded solutions and sometimes have very frequent writes is that when it goes the whole partition is pretty much hosed.

My experience as we use SSDs for our embedded solutions and sometimes have very frequent writes is that when it goes the whole partition is pretty much hosed. I'm not sure what exactly fails but it seems like the file system index or journal goes and then the whole partition is mostly useless. We use a write filter to avoid writes to OS partition (writes redirect changes to memory) so it is mostly readonly but it still can fail and and when it does the system is unrecoverable. Other partitions may still be seemingly okay but we just replace once a failure is spotted. Disk based drives usually don't fail as catastrophically in my experience but do have more errors. Having said that we have been using them for past 5 years and only have had a dozen failures in that time over probably 500 deployments. And I think several of those were service replacing because they could not determine a root cause. Fortunately, we don't really have to try to recover anything from the drives but it does cause downtime when they fail.