Yes, if several hundred/thousand are failing at the same time. Here, we're talking about 2. Certainly, it's not a good sign that a reviewer gets 2 and they both fail, but it's not outside the realm of possibility that it could happen completely by chance and indeed, it has to happen some time.
That argument, while strictly true, is completely useless.
In the real world, we know that products often do have defects, and both consumers and manufacturers would like to have the defects fixed.
So a more useful question is how do defects get fixed after a product has already undergone its initial validation testing, and some units have passed production testing and been released into the field?
A common answer is that units that fail in the field can be carefully analyzed to determine the cause of failure, and if a widespread or serious failure mode is recognized, then the search for a remedy begins.
Also, it is interesting to try to frame your specious argument quantitatively, to try to make it actually worth something. So, note that a failure rate of about 0.5% per year is commonly considered very good for SSDs (Intel and Plextor have claimed to have failure rates of about 0.5% per year).
If the failures of the two 840 Pro SSDs at anandtech were random and independent (uncorrelated) and the chance of failure of each is less than 0.5% (technically, significantly less since they failed in less than a week each, but for argument sake I will skip that complication), then the probability that two out of two failed is longer than 1 in 40,000. That already makes any reasonable person question our initial assumption of random and independent failures. Add to that the observation that the two SSDs failed with similar symptoms and after running similar workloads, and it looks even more likely that the two failures were correlated in some manner.
So, if the failures were correlated, what can we conclude? Still nothing definite, since it is possible that the two SSDs were both exposed to some stress outside of their specification that caused them to fail. But I tend to discount that possibility since Anand is experienced at testing SSDs and I would expect that if he changed his test equipment recently (or had his test equipment fail in a way that causes undue stress on the SSDs) that it is likely he would have corrected it before now. Therefore, the most likely cause of the correlated failures is a defect in the 840 Pro SSDs.
Now it is incumbent upon Samsung to do a failure analysis on the units, and hopefully get back to anandtech with a failure report.
i wonder just how long these 830's will last.. SSD's are ment to go for 10+ years and with lower writes to the drive it could last 20+ years
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