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Wouldn't that failure mode be most equivalent to something like a bad blocks failure on a hard drive?

Both can have random ~controller electronics failures, and I think the SSD is often designed to be impossible to recover in that situation with a replacement controller or other electronics.

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You are entirely correct, however most consumers would take the loss and discard the data rather than replace a drive controller or salvage the platters. That's something they would need to hire an expensive data recovery service for.

If you're a business or a professional then certainly HDDs provide you with more recovery opportunities.

It's certainly interesting how failure modes play out for consumers given that they more often run drives to some failure..

While I wouldn't buy a HDD as a consumer, I think they are all around better from this angle. Many consumers actually did pay to have a thesis retrieved from HDDs when laptops were still using them and the partial media failure offering a data retrieval is basically the same bad option often presented on either.

(The article is out of date and I would suspect SSDs have improved at a faster rate than HDDs since, but some of that improvement will have been redirected to make even cheaper consumer options.)

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