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I had a SSD fail not long ago. It was used regularly, but one day I noticed that reading a large file failed. I went into panic mode and stopped using it and attempted to copy everything to a new drive, but copying many of the large files failed. These large files consisted of things like music which had not been edited for years. This sounds like neither of your scenarios - not thermal bit flipping, and not overwriting. How common are failures of this sort?

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Frankly, we have no idea. If the manufacturers know, they're not telling us. I've seen dozens of failed SSDs and their failure modes are completely different from rotating disks and almost always lead to complete or significant data loss with little to no warning.

What numbers we have show that failure rates are low, but honestly I would give it another decade or two before using SSD for persistent data storage (of important data without backups to rotating disks). I don't think we're there yet.

I think you're missing that there is no such thing as 'not edited' on a SSD. Data gets moved around by firmware all the time in order to ensure wear leveling is applied equally all over the drive. This is the exact kind of failure you should expect on an SSD.

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