The difference between a purported nation-state backed subversion of supply chain and manufacturing lines, and poor security in the firmware of the BMC, is still night and day though, and still not what the original article claimed.
Using x2go means you get a persistent desktop: your apps are left running when you close the session, and you can resume where you left off when you reconnect.
These are all just ratings though. The theory is that over a population of drives, you'll see a higher failure rate than predicted if you do higher than the rated workload per year. WDC used to have a whitepaper on it called "Why Specify Workload", but it's no longer on their site.
I have in some cases seen enterprise sata drives pushed to the kinds of workload you're talking about - 2.5PB in a year - and seen in the order of 10% fail over that time, with a drive that normally has a ~0.5% AFR.
The article is wrong on this point, and on Intel's intentions, as far as I can tell. Intel has a "Supernova" feature (http://itpeernetwork.intel.com/data-integrity-in-solid-state...) which will cause some drive models to brick themselves if certain conditions are met - errors in the control path, for example, which basically mean you cannot trust the drive at all. The supernova feature is only claimed for enterprise drives, and the 335 series is not an enterprise drive.
I have a lot of experience with long-running Intel SSDs of various models, including pushing them to the same kinds of extreme that the SSD endurance experiment did, and I have never observed them to self-brick simply because they reached their flash endurance point.
What I have observed is a number of firmware bugs (or possibly just the supernova feature) that caused the drive to brick on power cycle, even for drives in perfect health.
I liked the SSD endurance articles, because they went a long way to allaying fears about SSDs, but I think it's a shame they've left this point in.
"SSDs though, they just disappear from the bus when they fail"
This isn't always true, and actually shouldn't ever be true - it's a particular failure mode you're seeing, and while it appears to be one common across a number of SSD controllers, it's still a pretty sorry fact that it happens.
All SSDs (at least all not-complete-rubbish ones) report some kind of flash/media wearout indicator via SMART, which isn't necessarily an imminent failure indicator (SSDs will generally continue to work long past the technical wearout point), but is a very strong indicator that you should replace it soon and should probably buy a better one next time.
SSDs do suffer from sector reallocations in the normal way, and the same kind of metric monitoring can be done. It's pretty vendor-specific as to what SMART attributes they report, but attributes like available reserved space, total flash writes, flash erase and flash write failure counts and so on are pretty common.