When I read that I also thought "That's horrible, guess I won't buy that drive." When I read further though, I discovered that all the drives in his test become unreadable ("bricked"?) when they eventually failed.

Well for the others, if you really care about it you can see that sectors start getting remapped and think "ah ok time to start thinking about backing this data up and replace the drive" whereas if I understand correctly on the Intel one you pretty much immediately need to backup the data and hope that you don't need to restart or lose power before you've backed up what you need.

I'm sure it's more nuanced than that but my reaction was definitely "steer clear of the Intel drives ..." when I read this so perhaps someone can clarify.

Backup shouldn't be something to do when the drive is exhaling its last breath or even showing first symptoms, it should be done often and in a transparent way. On a laptop the best practice is to arrange a sync with a server (NAS etc.) when one gets home. If done incrementally it requires from seconds to minutes and is fully automatic. Unfortunately making backups still isn't common practice; most users see a NAS or even an external drive as wasted money. They feel safe by "backing up" some data on a USB key only to discover how volatile and unsafe it might be when it's too late (breaks, washing machine, theft, loss, etc.)