You state don't use the CD-R analogy, use another type of media, something closer, well I've had every type of drive / media fail so far with one exception, a SCSI hard drive and there's no doubt they will fail eventually as well. You seemingly live in a world of 100% and absolutes. I've had Kodak Golds, Mam-A Golds, cheaper CDR media, all have fail. I've had good USB flash drives fail and even a couple CF cards go south. For the amount of use these solid state media have had a much higher rate of failure. I'm the first to admit I thought it'd be years before SS media would fail simply because there's no moving parts. This is before we start talking about my clients.
"The hit in performance isn't going to materialize in five years, if it hasn't happened in one. Data corruption won't either as long as the SSD was designed with quality components spec'd within their design parameters."
The performance hit doesn't stop at one year with SSD or any other drive. I don't know why you don't believe data corruption can happen in 1 day, 1 month, 1 year, 10 years or 20 years, it truly is random. The solid state drives that I have had fail ALL were the best at the time. If you have never had a CF or thumb drive go south, I'd just say you're lucky. If they never died why does seemingly every photographer back up their images out in the field? I know, just in case they lose the CF card.
I think it might be both.
And I'm sorry, overclock systems will cause more issues on average and I wont fire myself. You just might not have enough of a sample size to know this. I'll agree that CPUs today seem to have a higher yield than of "yesterday" but it's NOT 100%.
You can't seem to understand how fast a software program runs isn't just based upon the hardware, two identical machines can have different performance running the same program. Claiming 30% this and 30% that is irrelevant to the discussion, as I stated does the software utilize it. How efficient is the machine?
A faster machine is NOT necessarily a faster machine. I don't know why that's so difficult to understand.