My guess is because the failure time is 'supposedly' more predictable than with traditional HDDs due to each drive being rated for a finite number of write/erase cycles. The notion that we've gone beyond the era of plug and pray and and that you've got a perfectly predictable piece of equipment whose life you can actively prolong is very appealing when compared to the seemingly random failure of HDDs. Although, you could make your HDD last far longer if you made sure to use it as little as possible too. Tech websites never advised that! I'd consider 5 years a good run for an HDD, while people are worried that their 256GB TLC NAND (the cheapest type available) SSD is only rated for 1000 W/E cycles, equivalent to about 20 years at 10GB of writes per day? Factors like write amplification and other electronic failures will bring this figure down, but it gives you an idea. Search the internet for SSD failure. You'll almost entirely find articles about the possibility of SSD failure rather than people who've had SSDs fail.Still, if this is true - why is write lifecycle of an SSD such an important factor in reviews - even for the consumer market and by just about every serious and crictial/no-nonsense website out there?
Paranoia about SSD longetivity is largely where I see the odd bit of bunk advice being given (as I mentioned earlier). There's this whole thing about avoiding small writes as much as possible, but small random writes are exactly the kind of thing that SSD is very good at. The software that most SSDs come with typically indicates the health of your drive in very fine detail (wear levelling count, W/E cycles, error counts etc) so the more paranoid among us are well served. My advice? Use your SSD. It's probably going to at least match the lifetime of any HDD you've owned. Back up regularly. If it breaks, buy another one.
